extended household

noun

A household with additional members compared to a nuclear family.

Meanings

nounextended household (plural extended households)

plural extended households

  1. A household with additional members compared to a nuclear family.

    The low incidence of extended households in my data and the high proportion of high-caste residents precludes a meaningful test of this hypothesis here.

    1972, Sylvia Vatuk, Kinship and Urbanization: White Collar Migrants in North India, page 63
    1 more example

    For example, a household consisting of a head, wife, son, and daughter is ordinarily classified as a nuclear household, while a household containing a father, mother, head, and sister is usually classified as an extended household, even though the two are biologically identical.

    1987, Steven Ruggles, Prolonged Connections: The Rise of the Extended Family in Nineteenth-century England and America
  2. During the COVID-19 pandemic, a group of people living in different places but forming a close support network, obliged to follow lockdown rules as if they belonged to a single household.
    1 more example

    Under the five tier system in Scotland, people who live on their own or only with children under 18 can form an extended household with people from one other household. People in extended households are counted as one household, and so can continue to meet and socialise with each other despite general restrictions on households mixing, and can stay overnight in each other's homes.

    2020, Michelle Roberts, “Support bubbles: How do they work and who is in yours?”, in BBC
Cite this entry
APA

extended household. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 5, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/extended%20household

MLA

“extended household.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/extended%20household. Accessed November 5, 2026.

Chicago

WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “extended household,” accessed November 5, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/extended%20household.

Source: extended household on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.