Linage

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The family descent or ancestral line traced back through one's forebears ; the rate or payment calculated by the number of printed lines in a publication
2. A person's ancestry or line of descent from earlier generations ; the charge for newspaper or magazine text figured by how many lines it fills
3. Ancestral origin traced through a family's generations ; a fee for printed material measured by the count of lines it occupies on a page

Etymology: "Linage" is an older spelling of "lineage," and the two are the same word, so its history is really the history of "lineage." It arrived in Middle English as "linage," borrowed from Old French "linage," which was built on "ligne," the French descendant of Latin "linea," meaning "line." The Latin word originally referred to a thread or cord, and the idea of a line of descent grew naturally from that sense of a continuous string running from one generation to the next. The ending "-age" is a French suffix that turns a noun into a collective or a concept, as in "lineage" meaning the whole set of ancestors in a line. Put together, the word combines the image of a line with the idea of a collection, so a lineage is a body of descendants traced along one thread back through time.