From Longman Dictionary of Contemporary Englishcousincous‧in /ˈkʌzən/ ●●● S2 noun [countable] 1 SSFthe child of your uncle or aunt → first cousin, kissing cousin, second cousin2 LIKE/SIMILARsomething that has the same origins as something elsecousin of/to a drug that is a chemical cousin to amphetaminesclose/distant cousin The Alaskan brown bear is a close cousin of the grizzly bear.3 someone or something that is similar to someone or something else His avant-garde music, sometime cousin to jazz, had limited appeal.
Examples from the Corpus
cousin• Mary Donovan is a cousin of my father's!• He'd lost a cousin and some good friends in these reprisals.• She was employed by cousin Gruner, the doctor, who had this work invented for her.• Apes may be distant cousins of humans.• The plantain is a large cousin of the banana.• When I was little my cousin used to come over to my house.• This was obviously not Silvia, Guido's cousin with whom Jeff had so unwisely fallen in love!• The cousins were very polite and in fact charming.close/distant cousin• The Citizen's Charter Unit is a close cousin of Labour's proposed ministry for women.• He married a distant cousin, Jocasta.• Joszef had put capital into the real estate business of a distant cousin.• To think: a distant cousin of the Romanovs, and his love.• A distant cousin had once ended up in the hail.• They were, in fat, distant cousins, something they never found out.• Charles's distant cousin John Carroll was drawn only once from the religious into the civil sphere during the war.Origin cousin (1200-1300) Old French cosin, from Latin consobrinus, from com- ( → COM-) + sobrinus “cousin on the mother's side” (from soror “sister”) 