We study some mathematical properties of a new generator of continuous distributions with two extra parameters called the exponentiated half-logistic family. We present some special models. We investigate the shapes of the density and hazard rate function. We derive explicit expressions for the ordinary and incomplete moments, quantile and generating functions, probability weighted moments, Bonferroni and Lorenz curves, Shannon and Rényi entropies, and order statistics, which hold for any baseline model. We introduce two bivariate extensions of this family. We discuss the estimation of the model parameters by maximum likelihood and demonstrate the potentiality of the new family by means of two real data sets.