kin – English noun declension

English noun forms of kin

Noun: kin
Singularkin
Pluralkins; kin

Sample Sentences

  • the starfish and its kin the sea urchin
  • c. 1620, Francis Bacon, letter of advice to Sir George Villiers
  • You are of kin, and so must be a friend to their persons.
  • Based on the number of teeth ammonites had—nine—it's believed that their closest living kin are octopuses. [2014, Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, Picador, →ISBN, page 84:]
  • Among those who derive information related to work from personal contacts, nonkins, rather than kins, constitute the most important sources even for women. [2016, Saraswati Raju, Santosh Jatrana, Women Workers in Urban India, page 280:]
  • Such sensations, however, were too near a kin to resentment to be long guiding Fanny's soliloquies. [1814 May 9, [Jane Austen], chapter XIII, in Mansfield Park: […], volume III, London: […] [George Sidney] for T[homas] Egerton, […], →OCLC, page 248:]

Etymology

1. 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”).
2. 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”), Norwegian Bokmål and Norwegian Nynorsk kjønn (“gender, sex”), Swedish kön (“gender, sex”), Faroese and 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”). See: Middle English Nouns 'kyn', Old English Nouns 'cynn', Dutch Nouns 'kunne', Danish Nouns 'køn', Swedish Nouns 'kön', Finnish Nouns 'kunnia'.

Verbs referencing "kin"

Latin Nouns genus, Irish Nouns gin, Old Norse Nouns kyn, Swedish Nouns kön, Finnish Nouns kunnia, Danish Nouns køn.