relation
noun
Simple meaning
A relationship; the manner in which and tone with which people or states.
Pronunciation
Say it like this:
reelayshuhnSay the bold part a little louder.
IPA pronunciation (US)
ɹiˈleɪʃən
This word is pronounced essentially the same in American and British English, so one transcription covers both.
IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) is a standard way of writing speech sounds.
Definition
Everyday modern meanings first, grouped by part of speech.
noun
chiefly in the plural
A relationship; the manner in which and tone with which people or states, etc. interact.
The manner in which two things may be associated.
A member of one's extended family; a relative.
The act of relating a story.
An act of narration
“He was the hero according to his own relation.”
Word at a Glance
- Difficulty
- B1 · Intermediate
- Frequency
- Common
- Typical Use
- Everyday English
Word Aura™
How this word commonly comes across.
Aura for this meaning
This meaning: A relationship; the manner in which and tone with which people or states, etc. interact.
Used this way, relation is a reasonably familiar word that usually carries little praise or criticism of its own. It turns up most in relationships contexts.
- Emotional tone
- Neutral
- Formality
- Neutral
- Intensity
- Not strongly marked
- How common
- Moderately common
- Connotation
- Matter-of-fact
- Usage feel
- Neutral and straightforward
Where it naturally appears
- Relationships
Word Aura describes common impressions, not a measurement. Tone changes with sentence, speaker, relationship and situation.
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Common Patterns and Combinations
How this word naturally appears with others.
Word Family
Related forms, grouped by how they connect.
Inflected forms
Grammatical variations of the same word.
Mutual dealings or connections or communications among persons or groups.
Word family
Words built from the same root.
A relation between people.
Compound terms
Established multiword terms.
The principle that an act done at a later time is deemed by law to have occurred at an earlier time.
One related by blood or origin.
The responsibility of a lawyer to act in the best interests of the client.
A logical relation between propositions p and q of the form `if p then q'.
The responsibility of a confidential adviser to act in the best interest of the advisee.
The responsibility of a conservator to act in the best interests of the ward.
Related words
Connected by subject or meaning, not by word formation.
A database in which relations between information items are explicitly specified as accessible attributes.
A two-way tabulation of the relations between correlates.
The use of statistical correlation to evaluate the strength of the relations between variables.
A statistical relation between two or more variables such that systematic changes in the value of one variable are accompanied by systematic changes in the other.
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Dictionary data from Wiktionary via the Free Dictionary API. Simple meanings, combinations and word intelligence are built from verified reference data, no AI is used to load this page.