lineage
/ˈlɪnɪɪdʒ
/noun
1 [mass noun] Direct descent from an ancestor; ancestry or pedigree: a Dutch nobleman of ancient lineage [count noun]: great families and their lineages...
- He can also claim lineage to Thyagaraja's direct disciples through various ancestors.
- there are too few of direct lineage to replace them.
- Brian Feeney, a historian who has written the definitive book on Sinn Fein, believes Adams and his party has the best claim to direct lineage.
Synonyms
ancestry, family, parentage, birth;
descent, line, extraction, derivation, heritage, genealogy, roots, house, dynasty, origin, background;
stock, strain, race, bloodline, blood, breeding, pedigree, succession
1.1 [count noun] Anthropology A social group tracing its descent from a single ancestor.Generally, land belongs jointly to the members of lineages or other kin groups....
- The important kin groups are patrilineal and matrilineal lineages and clans, Clan members do not necessarily live on clan land.
- A smaller unit is the lineage, a kin group of four or five generations descended from a male ancestor traced though the male line.
2 Biology A sequence of species each of which is considered to have evolved from its predecessor: the chimpanzee and gorilla lineages...
- We also determined which phylogenetic lineages had evolved faster or slower.
- Trends can be seen either as lineage trends in evolving lineages, or biosphere trends affecting the evolution of life as a whole.
- Perhaps the lineage survived as refugium species and thus repopulated during the post-Cretaceous recovery.
2.1A sequence of cells in the body which developed from a common ancestral cell: the myeloid lineage...
- Those experiments showed that the neural stem cells in the mutant mice developed into the normal lineages of cells in the embryonic brain.
- These cells differentiate into two main cell lineages (ie, myeloid and lymphoid pathways) that lead to the production of blood cells.
- The nia nucleotide sequences were compared among Fusarium species representative of different lineages.
Origin
Middle English: from Old French lignage, from Latin linea 'a line' (see line1).