superfamilyn.

1872 T. Gill in Proc. 20th Meeting Amer. Assoc. Advancem. Sci. 292 To indicate the termination of series, a new designation has been introduced,—the superfamily,—and it is to be understood that the second group originates either from the same common progenitor as the first, or from a representative of the first group.

1899 G. H. Carpenter Insects iii. 155 Some naturalists..classing Pararge and its allies as a sub-family of Nymphalidæ... Others, allowing them family rank, would group them together with the Nymphalidæ and other allied families into a super-family.

1953 E. Mayr et al. Methods & Princ. Systematic Zool. iii. 52 The age of specialization has resulted in a general pushing upward of the categories, subfamilies becoming families, and families becoming superfamilies.

1978 Nature 16 Nov. 264/2 All three families of humans and apes are included in the superfamily Hominoidea.

2006 K. D. Rose Beginning Age Mammals xv. 330/1 The phylogenetic position of simimyids is uncertain, and they have been variously allied with both superfamilies.

1941 Language 17 289 A Macro-Penutian super-family is made to include Mayan, Uto-Aztecan, other languages of Mexico, and still others as far distant as California and British Columbia.

1951 Internat. Jrnl. Amer. Linguistics 17 266 A superfamily..is established by Loukotka for the languages of the following eight language families.

1989 Sci. Amer. Oct. 90/1 More than 20 years ago the Soviet linguists Vladislav M. Illich-Svitych and Aron Dolgopolsky proposed that a number of Eurasian language families, including, among others, the Indo-European, the Afro-Asiatic and the Dravidian, are related in a ‘superfamily’ they called the Nostratic.

2003 N.Y. Times (Nexis) 15 July f1 Humans dispersed from the African homeland and one language became many, under pressures of distance and tribal differentiation, splitting into at least 19 superfamilies.

1947 Lancet 8 Feb. 221/1 By ‘reticular’ tissue Bogomoletz meant not merely the reticulo-endothelium but the whole of what many histologists call the ‘mesenchymal’ tissue—the haemopoietic tissues and their derivatives, vascular and lymphatic endothelium, and all the cells belonging to the superfamily of fibroblasts.

1969 Sci. Amer. Mar. 48/3 Particles that have certain properties in common (spin and parity) can be classified as members of a ‘supermultiplet’ or superfamily.

1974 M. O. Dayhoff in Federation Proc. (Federation Amer. Soc. Exper. Biol.) 33 2315/3 So slow is this change that in all living vertebrates homologues of all such proteins that were present in the ancestral vertebrate would still be recognized as members of the same protein superfamily.

1989 B. Alberts et al. Molecular Biol. Cell (ed. 2) xiv. 821 (caption) The fibronectin receptor belongs to a large superfamily of homologous matrix receptors called integrins.

2002 F. Close et al. Particle Odyssey x. 205 Supersymmetry links all of these particles within one ‘superfamily’, but it does so at the expense of predicting many more particles.

2010 Nature 14 Jan. 169/1 Reactions mediated by the enzyme cytochrome c oxidase, a member of the haem-copper oxidase (HCO) superfamily, probably also proceed through a ferric hydroperoxo-complex.