On Tue, 26 Nov 2002, H. T. wrote: #No, the type you are completely related to by mother and father, to #distinguish from "step-brother". Drat, I knew I was leaving something out of my earlier list of possibilities. If your parents divorced or one of them died, and one of them then marries someone who has a son by a previous marriage, your parent's new spouse is your stepparent (stepfather or stepmother, hyphen optional in all cases) and their son is your stepbrother. A stepbrother has no genetic relationship to you and should not be confused with a half-brother (hyphen required, IMHO), who is the son of one of your parents but not the other. This situation typically arises when someone who has a child by a previous marriage remarries and has a child with the new spouse. The children of the remarried person, by the different marriages, are each other's half-siblings. "Full brother" can be used to refer to a male who is the (genetic) son of both the people who are your (genetic) parents, to distinguish him >from a half- or step-brother. (And this doesn't even get into the question of host mothers and sperm-donor fathers.) -- Dr. Whom, Consulting Linguist, Grammarian, Orthoepist, and Philological Busybody a.k.a. Mark A. Mandel