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Sister

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 female sibling. In poetry, she may represent companionship, rivalry, shared memory, or family resemblance.

Detailed Definition
A sister in poetry often shares the speaker’s earliest landscape of games, quarrels, secrets, and household rituals. Her presence can make family history feel immediate, since she may remember the same events differently. Poets use sisterhood to explore closeness and competition, mutual protection, grief after separation, and the ways siblings inherit similar burdens while creating distinct lives. The term may refer to a biological, adoptive, religious, or chosen bond.
Example
Example in poetry:
In Lucille Clifton’s poems, family members often become figures of memory, survival, and inheritance, including sisters; A speaker might write, “My sister knows the language of every scar,” making sisterhood a shared history; A poem can use sister as an intimate address, as in “Sister, come sit beside the river before it darkens”; The term can also be chosen kinship, as in “She was not born my sister, but she kept my name alive”
Additional Notes
Sister may represent intimacy through shared childhood and memory, but also rivalry or distance. The term can reveal how family resemblance shapes identity.
Also Known As
Sis nun The Nun
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