confraternity

From Middle French confraternité.

confraternity (countable and uncountable, plural confraternities)

1. (countable) A group with a common interest.
   • 1909 April, John Burroughs, “The Long Road”, in The Atlantic Monthly‎, volume 13, The Riverside Press, page 458:

     First the cell, then combinations of cells, then combinations of combinations, then more and more complex combinations, till the body of man is reached, where endless confraternities of cells, all with different functions, working to build and sustain different organs, […]

   • 1971, Anthony Powell, Books Do Furnish a Room, University of Chicago Press, published 2010, →ISBN:

     The two gravitated together in response to that law of nature which rules that the whole confraternity of politicians prefer to operate within the closed circle of its own initiates, rather than waste time with outsiders […]

2. (countable) A religious fraternity or brotherhood.
   • 2002 September, John Van Engen, “The Future of Medieval Church History”, in Church History, volume 71, number 3:

     […] in the later Middle Ages, in an urban complex, Carthusians and Benedictines would have existed alongside friars and beguines (and their southern counterparts) and possibly a Jewish community, […] many others committed to a confraternity or to special ascetic exercises […]

3. (uncountable) Brotherly friendship.
   • 1850 November, Thomas Jefferson, American Whig Review:

     [Napoleon's] coronation as Emperor had been followed immediately by the great battle of Austerlitz, which had prostrated Austria at his feet, and reduced the Czar of Russia to so humiliating a condition as ended in the total disruption of his confraternity with the Germanic powers.

   • 1875, Mark Twain, Mark Twain's Sketches, New and Old:

     The great lights of commercial jurisprudence, international confraternity, and biological deviation, of all ages, all civilizations, and all nationalities, from Zoroaster down to Horace Greeley […]

   • 1993, Greg Bear, Moving Mars, New York: Tor Books:

     I had seen and done things in the past few days that my entire life had not prepared me for, and I had felt emotions unknown to me: righteous anger, political confraternity and solidarity, deep fear.

• archconfraternity
• confraternal