n. The collective body of persons who form one household under one head and one domestic government, including parents, children, and servants, and as sometimes used even lodgers or boarders.n. Parents with their children, whether they dwell together or not; in a more general sense, any group of persons closely related by blood, as parents, children, uncles, aunts, and cousins: often used in a restricted sense only of a group of parents and children founded upon the principle of monogamy.n. In a narrow use, the children of the same parents, considered collectively apart from the parents: as, they (a husband and wife) have a large family to care for; a family of children.n. In the most general sense, those who descend from a common progenitor; a tribe or race; kindred; lineage.n. Hence Any group or aggregation of things classed together as kindred or related from possessing in common characteristics which distinguish them from other things of the same order.n. Specifically In scientific classifications, a group of individuals more comprehensive than a genus and less so than an order, based on fewer or less definite points of physical resemblance than the former, and on more or more definite ones than the latter.n. Course of descent; genealogy.n. Descent: especially, noble or respectable stock: as, a man of good family.n. A cluster of microscopic plants formed by the adherence of a number of individuals; a colony.Pertaining to or connected with the family.n. In petrography the term is used by Rosenbusch to embrace igneous rocks which are alike in composition and texture: as, the family of syenitic rocks; the family of essexite; the family of phonolitic rocks. In the quantitative system of classification (1902) it is suggested that the term be applied to a group of igneous rocks which are developed from the same parent magma by processes of differentiation — that is, any group of consanguineous rocks.
