Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun A family unit consisting of a mother and father and their children.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun A family consisting of parents and their children and grandparents of a marital partner.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun a
family unit consisting of at most afather ,mother anddependent children
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun a family consisting of parents and their children and grandparents of a marital partner
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
[From nuclear, basic, cardinal, central.]
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Examples
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bilby commented on the word nuclear family
"There is an inherent contradiction in Cuba between the socialist ideals of the revolution and the bourgeois paradigm of the nuclear family which is what most Cubans take as the basic unit of the modern state. In the nuclear family the child is confronted by only two adults contrasted by sex. The tendency towards polarisation in unavoidable."
- 'Women and power in Cuba', Germaine Greer in The Madwoman's Underclothes.
September 1, 2008
gangerh commented on the word nuclear family
--- the sort of morning that is generally reserved only for breakfast cereal commercials, where members of a nauseatingly bouncy nuclear family leap around like happy gazelles while something resembling wood shavings and latex paint falls in slow motion into a bowl.
The Fourth Bear by Jasper Fforde.
September 9, 2008