family resemblance

family resemblance (plural family resemblances)

1. Physical similarities shared between close relatives, especially between parents and children and between siblings.
2. (philosophy) One of a series of overlapping similarities between two or more comparanda.
   • 2006, Matt Wray, Not Quite White, page 4:

     What does it mean to be part of the racial majority, and how have different social groups achieved that? Whiteness studies wanted to know. This was a significant shift of the theoretical and empirical gaze, from the subordinate to the dominant, from the minority to the majority, and it shared a family resemblance to the contemporaneous shift in women's studies from studying women to studying men and masculinities.

• “family resemblance”, in Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster, 1996–present.