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relation

nouncommon in dialogue

  • United States//ɹɪˈleɪʃ(ə)n//
  • Australia//ɹəˈlæ̝ɪʃ(ə)n//

The manner in which two things may be associated.

noun

  1. 1

    The manner in which two things may be associated.

    The relation between diet and health is complex.

    Carried somehow, somewhither, for some reason, on these surging floods, were these travelers, of errand not wholly obvious to their fellows, yet of such sort as to call into query alike the nature of their errand and their own relations. It is easily earned repetition to state that Josephine St. Auban's was a presence not to be concealed.

  2. 2

    A member of one's extended family; a relative.

    Yes, he's a relation of mine, but only a distant one.

  3. 3

    A relationship; the manner in which and tone with which people or states, etc. interact.

    the foreign relations of the United States

  4. 4

    The act of relating a story.

    Your relation of the events is different from mine.

    I shall you make relacyon By way of apostrofacyon […] How I, Skelton laureat, Devysed and also wrate Uppon a lewde curate, […]

    1669, Letter from Dr. Merrett to Thomas Browne, in Simon Wilkin (ed.), Sir Thomas Browne’s Works including his Life and Correspondence, London: William Pickering, 1836, Volume I, p. 443, Many of the lupus piscis I have seen, and have bin informed by the king’s fishmonger they are taken on our coast, but was not satisfied for some reasons of his relation soe as to enter it into my Pinax […]

    1691, Arthur Gorges (translator), The Wisdom of the Ancients by Francis Bacon (1609), London, Preface, […] seeing they are diversly related by Writers that lived near about one and the self-same time, we may easily perceive that they were common things, derived from precedent Memorials; and that they became various, by reason of the divers Ornaments bestowed on them by particular Relations […]

  5. 5

    A set of ordered tuples.

  6. 6

    A set of ordered tuples. A set of ordered pairs; a binary relation.

    Equality is a symmetric relation, while divisibility is not.

  7. 7

    A set of tuples, implemented as a table in a relational database.

    This relation uses the customer's social security number as a key.

  8. 8

    A statement of equality of two products of generators, used in the presentation of a group.

  9. 9

    A subobject of a product of objects.

  10. 10

    The act of intercourse.

    have relations with

    have sexual relations with

Etymology

From Middle English relacion, relacioun, from Anglo-Norman relacioun and Old French relacion (whence French relation), from Latin relātiō, noun of process form from perfect passive participle relātus (“related”), from verb referō (“to refer, to relate”), from prefix re- (“again”) + ferō (“to bear, to carry”). By surface analysis, relate + -ion. Doublet of relazione.

Forms

plural
relations
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).