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brother-in-law

nouncommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈbɹʌðəɹ ɪn ˌlɔː//
  • United States//ˈbɹʌðɚ ɪn ˌlɔ//
  • //ˈbɹʌðɚ ɪn ˌlɑ//

A male relative of one's generation, separated by one degree of marriage: The brother of one's spouse.

noun

  1. 1

    A male relative of one's generation, separated by one degree of marriage: The brother of one's spouse.

    The US Securities and Exchange Commission has closed its insider trading investigation into stock trades made by then-Sen. Richard Burr and his brother-in-law at the outset of the pandemic, the former senator announced Friday.

  2. 2

    A male relative of one's generation, separated by one degree of marriage: The husband of one's sibling.

  3. 3

    Co-brother-in-law: A male relative of one's generation, separated by two degrees of marriage: The husband of the sibling of one's spouse.

    He was appalled by trench conditions and the prolongation of the war, a disillusionment further encouraged by the Easter rising, in which his brother-in-law, Francis Sheehy-Skeffington (qv), was murdered by a deranged Anglo–Irish officer, J. C. Bowen-Colthurst (qv).

  4. 4

    Co-brother-in-law: A male relative of one's generation, separated by two degrees of marriage: The brother of the spouse of one's sibling.

Etymology

From Middle English brother-in-lawe; equivalent to brother + -in-law.

Forms

plural
brothers-in-law, brethren-in-law, brother-in-laws
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).