Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- adj. Of or relating to a family.
- adj. Occurring or tending to occur among members of a family, usually by heredity: familial traits; familial disease.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- Occurring in members of the same family, though not necessarily hereditary: said of certain diseases, especially of the nervous system.
- As in a family; family-like.
Wiktionary
- adj. Of or pertaining to human family.
- adj. technical Of or pertaining to any grouping of things referred to as a family.
GNU Webster's 1913
- adj. relating to or having the characteristics of a family.
- adj. tending to occur among members of a family, usually by hereditary transmission.
WordNet 3.0
- adj. occurring among members of a family usually by heredity
- adj. relating to or having the characteristics of a family
Etymologies
- From the Latin familia suffixed with -al. (Wiktionary)
Examples
“The risk of gastrointestinal carcinoma in familial juvenile polyposis.”
“Correction of hemodynamic abnormalities by vesicoamniotic shunting in familial congenital megacystis.”
Obstructive Uropathy, Fetal Intervention for Obstructive Uropathy
“Nestorowicz A, Glaser B, Wilson BA, Shyng SL, Nichols CG, Stanley CA, et al. Genetic heterogeneity in familial hyperinsulinism [published erratum appears in Hum Mol Genet 1998 Sep; 7 (9): 1527].”
“At the Virginia news conference, Prince William County prosecutor Paul Ebert and Fairfax County Police Detective John Kelly said the case would have been solved years ago if Virginia police had been allowed to use what is called "familial DNA" searching.”
“Spanking was a punishment that was delivered upon my sister and I when we breached certain familial rules, like not acting in any way that might bring harm to ourselves or to each other.”
“As he tells it, observation of them constitutes his first "lessons" in familial relations,”
“Might this involve walking tours and buggy rides along reconfigured paths, freshly coated with porous asphalt and punctuated with carefully structured picturesque garden views of heterosexual couples and their strapping, handsome kids in familial bliss, complemented with scenes of equally heterosexual deers, birds and bunnies?”
“Contemporary Christian religious culture abounded in familial imagery, both biological and spiritual, as an expression of community, often focused on Mary as both mother of God and mother of all the faithful.”
A Tender Age: Cultural Anxieties over the Child in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries
“These tales betray a renewed interest in familial pietas in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and its connection to Christian piety, and they reflect contemporary pastoral concerns. 6 The attention to mother and child also parallels and, as we shall see, derives in a variety of ways from the twelfth - and thirteenth-century tendencies to humanize Christ and his Mother.”
A Tender Age: Cultural Anxieties over the Child in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries
“How this equilibrium was maintained was, however, completely unknown, as was the cause of the highly increased blood cholesterol concentrations in familial hypercholesterolemia.”
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1985 - Presentation Speech
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘familial’.
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Mirrored Vowels
Rules:
• The word must have an even number of vowels.
• There must be four or more vowels; thus, at minimum, an A-A-A-A or A-B-B-A pattern.
• The vowels must appear in a mir...feminine, solicitor, caruncular, repackager, semiprimes, fetishises, decomposer, demonlover, recomposer, sepultures, lipotropic, colesterol and 385 more...
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Words
phantasmagoria, eviscerate, avast, simulacrum, varicose, oblique, gestalt, ersatz, vernal, vivace, stellate, synecdoche and 321 more...
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Fun to Say
Non-English is okay, but please don't add misspellings.
writhe, quibble, smock, festival, carnival, unicycle, panorama, mammogram, explicit, prehensile, pseudonym, antonym and 18 more...
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stpeter's Words
abase, abasement, abashed, abdicate, aberrant, abeyance, abhor, abhorrent, abide, abject, ablation, abnegation and 3536 more...
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List 005
hone, veneration, conformity, affable, paranoia, finite, perplexity, inclination, solitary, deadlock, heed, solicitous and 16 more...
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Remember Me (2010)
Words from a 2010 'Remember Me' film.
voluptuous, stop by, on a tear, take a hike, matriculate, banish, thresh, space out, flip the script, incarcerate, trample, off chance and 30 more...
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Family matters
double cousin, blood brother, blood relation, consanguinous, familial, parents
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Letharius's Words
Tweets
Looking for tweets for familial.
seanahan Very similar to filial. Jun 18, 2009
qroqqa Coined towards 1900 as a medical term, effectively a synonym for 'hereditary', as the older adjective 'familiar' was unsuitable. (In Latin the adjectival ending -al- dissimilated away from a previous medial /l/.) Jun 17, 2009