Cousins
name, noun, verb, slang ·Moderate ·College level
Definitions
- 1 The American intelligence services (from a British perspective) or the British intelligence services (from an American perspective). plural, plural-only, slang
"[T]he grounded fieldmen, the trainers and the case officers who made their own murmured caucus always – they saw the question solely in operational terms. […] They saw the shotgun marriage with the Cousins as just another skilful bit of tradecraft in a long and delicate poker game."
- 2 plural of cousin form-of, plural
- 3 plural of Cousin form-of, plural
- 4 Alternative letter-case form of cousins (“the American intelligence services (from a British perspective) or the British intelligence services (from an American perspective)”). alt-of
- 1 third-person singular simple present indicative of cousin form-of, indicative, present, singular, third-person
- 1 A surname from Middle English.
- 2 plural of Cousin form-of, plural
Example
More examples"The editor and the publisher are both my cousins."
Etymology
From cousin + -s (suffix forming pluralia tantum, regular plurals of nouns, and the third-person singular indicative present tense forms of verbs). The plural noun noun 1 sense 1 (“American or British intelligence services”) was popularized in the works of the English author John le Carré (David John Moore Cornwell; 1930–2020).
A Middle English surname from Norman terminology. From Anglo-Norman, from Old French cusin, cosin, cousin (“cousin”) (French cousin, cousine). Literally, “familial relative”.
From Cousin + -s.
See cousins.
Related phrases
More for "cousins"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.