Word of the Day Archive
Tuesday January 31, 2006
consanguineous \kon-san(g)-GWIN-ee-us\ , adjective:
Of the same blood; related by birth; descended from the same parent or ancestor.
These Neolithic people practiced agriculture in a settled communal life and are widely supposed to have had consanguineous clans as their basic social grouping.
-- Bruce Cumings, Korea's Place in the Sun
Am not I consanguineous? am I not of her blood?
-- William Shakespeare, Twelfth-Night
Among other preliminary activities, the prospective groom's party formally inquires as to the girl's clan-name; this is a ritualization of the taboo on consanguineous marriage.
-- Mark Laurent Asselin, "The Lu-school reading of 'Guanju' as preserved in an eastern Han fu", Journal of the American Oriental Society, July 1, 1997
Nowhere, not even in Holland, where the correspondence between the real aspects and the little polished canvases is so constant and so exquisite, do art and life seem so interfused and, as it were, so consanguineous.
-- "Noted with Pleasure", New York Times, October 6, 1991
Consanguineous is from Latin consanguineus, from com-, con-, "with, together" + sanguineus, from sanguis, sanguin-, "blood." The noun form is consanguinity, "relationship by blood, or close relation or connection."
Dictionary.com Entry and Pronunciation for consanguineous
