kin
n. uncountablen. your family and relatives. It is an older word that people still use today to talk about the people they are related to by blood.
n. one's family and relations collectively. Often used in legal or formal contexts to refer to blood relatives, though it can appear in literary or dialectal speech.
She invited all her kin to the wedding.
When the traveler fell ill in a foreign land, the hospital staff worked tirelessly to locate his next of kin.
The ancient laws of the clan dictated that any insult to an individual was an insult to their entire kin, often leading to long-standing feuds between families.
From Middle English kyn, from Old English cynn (“kind, sort, rank”), from Proto-West Germanic kuni, from Proto-Germanic kunją (“race, generation, descent”), from Proto-Indo-European ǵn̥h₁yom, from ǵenh₁- (“to produce”). Cognate with Scots kin (“relatives, kinfolk”), North Frisian kinn, kenn (“gender, race, family, kinship”), Dutch kunne (“gender, sex”), Middle Low German kunne (“gender, sex, race, family, lineage”), Danish køn (“gender, sex”), Swedish kön (“gender, sex”), Icelandic kyn (“gender”), Finnish kunnia (“honour, glory”), Ingrian kunnia (“reputation”), and through Indo-European, with Latin genus (“kind, sort, ancestry, birth”), Ancient Greek γένος (génos, “kind, race”), Sanskrit जनस् (jánas, “kind, race”), Albanian dhen (“(herd of) small cattle”).
Borrowed from Mandarin 琴 (qín), from a non-palatal dialect akin to Peking; or less likely, from Japanese 琴 (kin).
Clipping of fictionkin.
Typically functions as a collective noun; frequently appears in the fixed phrase 'next of kin'.