the.com/found family

means A group of people who choose each other and function as family — offering loyalty, love, and support — without being related by blood or marriage.

from Not an old word at all — it's a modern phrase that grew out of LGBTQ+ communities, where people often forged tight-knit chosen families after being rejected by or estranged from their biological ones. It later spread into wider pop-culture use (fandom, fiction, support groups) to describe any bond-by-choice that functions like kinship, so the phrase itself is young, but the impulse it names — gathering your own people — is as old as exile and friendship.