bloodline
Americannoun
noun
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of bloodline
Explanation
Your bloodline is your heritage or ancestry. In other words, your bloodline includes your parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and so on. You might talk about the bloodline of a show dog, bragging about the pedigree of your funny-looking terrier. Sometime a horse's bloodline is also a selling point, particularly when someone is betting on a race horse. You have a bloodline too, although the word more often describes the heritage of a famous or royal family. The Old English root word blod, means "blood." By the 13th century, blood also meant "family" or "heritage."
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
The “Game of Thrones” prequel boasts many dragons, most of them bound to the Targaryen royal bloodline.
From Salon ● Jun. 24, 2026
"Nobody discusses infertility, nobody discusses egg donation because it isn't the bloodline."
From BBC ● Mar. 7, 2026
That trust showed a $500,000 transfer from my father, explicitly described as a gift, made at the same time my father was supposedly creating his bloodline trust.
From MarketWatch ● Feb. 2, 2026
The Kim family has ruled North Korea with an iron grip for decades, and a cult of personality surrounding their so-called "Paektu bloodline" dominates daily life in the isolated country.
From Barron's ● Jan. 2, 2026
And what it was about Lelia that I desired and feared came partly through his bloodline running through her, the openness and exuberance and all that hard focus she could sometimes call up.
From "Native Speaker" by Chang-rae Lee
A brisk walk through this year’s picks with intriguing bloodlines:
From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 13, 2026
The reunion focused primarily on descendants of Willie Rosenthal’s son, the Rev. Taylor Rosenthal Sr., his 10 children and each of their respective bloodlines.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 21, 2026
For generations, the world’s top horse breeders have carefully mixed bloodlines for temperament, strength, conformation and athleticism.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 6, 2026
The Sisterhood engineers bloodlines, manipulating matches between great houses to cultivate leaders the Bene Gesserit can control, thereby influencing the flow of power.
From Salon ● Nov. 17, 2024
Someday he would have an army of them, but getting the bloodlines perfect was a slow business.
From "The Princess Bride" by William Goldman
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
