forty-second cousin
- noun
- /ˈfɔrti sɪkənd ˈkʌzən/
:
primo en el cuadragésimo segundo grado
- I only discovered last year that Emma is my forty-second cousin through a genealogy website.
Examples
-
She always jokes about being related to royalty as someone's forty-second cousin.
-
My forty-second cousin just contacted me on social media.
-
He's practically a stranger; he's my forty-second cousin on my father's side.
-
I didn't even know I had a forty-second cousin!
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I learned that Sarah is my forty-second cousin after tracing our family tree back several generations.
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Finding out that Mark is my distant forty-second cousin was surprising, as we had no idea we were related.
-
During the family reunion, we joked that my friend is actually my forty-second cousin because of our shared ancestry.
Synonyms
∞
1.0
A child of your aunt or uncle
645
1.0
A person who is in your family by blood or marriage
76
1.2
A person who is connected to you by blood or marriage
9
3.0
A person in your family by birth, not by marriage or adoption
3
2.8
A person who comes from the same family as you by birth, not by marriage
1
4.6
Being related to someone by blood or marriage
A person who is related by blood and shares a common ancestor
A relative who is from your mother's family
Relatives who come from the father's family line
How Distant
Surface Forms
Morphology
forty-second + cousin
The phrase is a straightforward composition of an ordinal number and a kinship term (forty-second + cousin), so a learner who knows both words will infer it denotes a very distant relative. Although the exact genealogical meaning (42 generations) is unusually specific, the numeric + kin term pattern is regular and cross-linguistically common, making the general sense transparent to B1 learners.
Etymology
The noun forty-second cousin comes from the image of a very long family tree. The parts forty-second and cousin show you share an ancestor 42 generations back, so a forty-second cousin is 'very distant' or 'practically a stranger' today.