Are all distant relatives cousins?

[Flex24]

I deal with a lot of companies and their employee paperwork and this week one with my surname come up.
One of my thoughts was...oooh I wonder if we are related....well it must be really distant....so we could be distant cousins.
The question is...if we are distantly related...can we be anything but cousins?? Is the 'cousin' superfluous?
Call ourselves 'Distants'?
Just thinking

[Maiden Stone]

How about kin?
I suppose if it turned out that you shared a common ancestor you would be cousins of some degree, perhaps several times removed. Distant cousin covers it without having to work it out.

[Ruskie]

It might depend what the surname is. If is is a common one you may not be related within a traceable timeframe. If the surname is an unusual one, perhaps you are related. To determine the relationship you would need to research both your own and this other person's family history to see if you can find a connection.

There are many of these on the web but this is the first I came across:
http://www.nzsgmig.com/13/index.php/joomla-overview/research/family-relationships-chart

Is there any reason you are looking for another term rather than "cousin"? I think "cousin" is probably the correct word to use. You may be a cousin x times removed but you would need to know your common ancestor to use this term as it is quite specific. In theory you could also be an 'aunt' or 'uncle' and have the same surname, or even closer - a great great etc grandmother or grandfather. Why not keep it simple and just say you are "distantly related" to someone? You can call yourself anything but people might not know what you are talking about if you refer to someone as "a distant", and I'm not sure that it makes sense.

You could both take DNA tests. If you are both males and both have the same surname a Y-DNA test might tell you if you are both descended from a common male ancestor. It is advisable to test 67 markers at the least, but preferably 111 markers. Alternatively, an autosomal DNA test will show common matches and shared chromosomes if you are related. Autosomal tests are a lot cheaper and if you have an interest in family history, it can be useful for finding matches on both maternal and paternal lines.

[andrewalston]

We are, of course, ALL related to each other, though the link may go back many thousand years.

"Mitochondrial Eve", who is the direct female ancestor of every living member of the species Homo Sapiens, lived about 150,000 years ago.

Hello, cousin! 

[coombs]

I went to school with a girl of Chinese parentage but born in the UK. No doubt she is a very distant cousin if I went back far enough, maybe many thousands of years but even so, we probably all are remotely related no matter how far removed we are now.