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Cousin

Kinship
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

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The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

A child of one’s aunt or uncle. Cousins often signify shared ancestry, childhood companionship, and branching family histories.

Detailed Definition
In poetry, cousins can create a sense of an expanded family world beyond the immediate household. They may be playmates at reunions, companions in ancestral places, or distant relatives known mainly through stories and resemblance. Poems about cousins often explore the mix of familiarity and strangeness within kinship: people share names, features, and history but grow into separate lives. The figure can also reveal migration, class differences, and scattered family memory.
Example
Example in poetry:
“My cousin and I counted stars above the farm” uses cousin to establish shared childhood memory; A poem may contrast cousins: “My cousin left for the city while I learned the names of fields”; “Cousin, you are the branch of the family tree that grew toward the sea” extends kinship into metaphor; In a reunion poem, “Even my distant cousin knew the song our grandmother sang” shows how family traditions travel
Additional Notes
A cousin may represent both closeness and distance: a familiar childhood companion who belongs to another household branch. Poets use cousins to explore reunions, shared memories, regional identity, and differing paths from common ancestry.
Also Known As
Cousin-German
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