Families

How to spell families

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce families

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does families mean?

1. nounMore than one group of related people, typically parents and their children.

Families in a sentence

• Several families moved into the new housing estate last month.

• The festival draws families from across the region every summer.

Where does families come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is the plural of 'family', which descends from the Latin familia, meaning a household, including all its servants, dependants, and relatives living under one roof. The root noun famulus literally meant a servant or attendant, so the earliest sense was closer to 'a body of household staff' than to blood relatives. The word entered English in the late 1400s, at first carrying that broad household meaning, and only later narrowed to the modern sense of parents and their children. The plural spelling trips writers because the singular ends in a consonant plus 'y', so that 'y' must change to 'i' before adding '-es', giving 'families' rather than 'familys'. The same Latin familia also gave us 'familiar', which originally described someone belonging to the household.

How the word is built

• famili- (from Latin familia: household)
• -es (plural noun suffix; final y becomes i before -es)