A cousin chart identifies the correct name for the relationship between two people with a common ancestor. This chart uses formal English relationship terms. For a general overview of kinship terminology, see the appropriate section in the article Family. The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ... A family of Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso in 1997 A family is a domestic group of people, or a number of domestic groups, typically affiliated by birth or marriage, or by comparable legal relationships including domestic partnership, adoption, surname and in some cases ownership (as was the case in the Roman...

The term cousin typically refers to the child of one's parent's sibling. This is more correctly termed a "first cousin". This article is about the domestic group. ...

More generally, "cousins" are any relatives that are neither siblings nor direct descendents/ancestors. Ordinal numbers (first, second, third, etc) are used to quantify in which preceding generation the common direct ancestor is located. The term is then completed with a number removed, which indicates how many generations separate the relatives in question. Commonly, ordinal numbers, or ordinals for short, are numbers used to denote the position in an ordered sequence: first, second, third, fourth, etc. ...

Thus, if one of John's great-great-grandparents is also one of Mary's great-great-great-great-grandparents, John and Mary are "third cousins twice removed". In purely mathematical terms, a sibling could be defined as a "zeroth cousin", and a niece/nephew–aunt/uncle relationship could be described as "zeroth cousins once removed"; however such terms are never used. John is a common name for males. ... Mary is a popular name worldwide originally derived from the ancient Egyptian word Mery meaning beloved, and is the most popular name for a female in the United States. ... John is a common name for males. ... Mary is a popular name worldwide originally derived from the ancient Egyptian word Mery meaning beloved, and is the most popular name for a female in the United States. ...

The chart below helps explain cousin relationships. Note that in informal usage, a granduncle is often called a great uncle and a grandaunt is often called a great aunt.

^* Here, "grandniece" is used as an abbreviation to indicate that they are each other's "grandniece/grandnephew & grandaunt/granduncle"

Mathematical definitions

The family relationship between two individuals a and b, where G_a and G_b respectively are the number of generations between each individual and their nearest common ancestor, can be calculated by the following: Generation is the act of producing offspring, or procreation. ... An ancestor is a parent or (recursively) the parent of an ancestor. ...

x = min (G_a,G_b)

y = |G_a-G_b|

• If x=0 and y=0 then they are the same person.
• If x=0 and y=1 then they are parent and child.
• If x=0 and y=2 then they are grandparent and grandchild.
• If x=0 and y>2 then they are great ... great-grandparent and great ... great-grandchild, with y−2 greats.

• If x=1 and y=0 then they are siblings (brothers or sisters).
• If x=1 and y=1 then they are uncle/aunt and nephew/niece.
• If x=1 and y>1 then they are great ... great uncle/aunt and great ... great nephew/niece, with y−1 greats.

• If x>1 and y=0 then they are (x−1)^th cousins.
• If x>1 and y>0 then they are (x−1)^th cousins y times removed.

So two people sharing a pair of grandparents have x=2 and y=0 and are described as being first cousins. Parenting comprises all the tasks involved in raising a child to an independent adult. ... A male Caucasian toddler child A child (plural: children) is a young human. ...

If x>0 and they only share one nearest common ancestor rather than two, then the word "half" is sometimes added at the beginning of the relationship.

See also

• Family
• Consanguinity