Meaning of relation in English

relation

noun

/rɪˈleɪ.ʃən/ us

/rɪˈleɪ.ʃən/

relation noun (FRIENDSHIP)

relations [ plural ]

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the way in which two people or groups of people feel and behave towards each other:

relations between Relations between him and his new wife are rather strained.

relation noun (CONNECTION)

B2 [ U ]

the connection or similarity between two things:

The relation between the original book and this new film is very faint.

She bears no relation to (= she is not similar to) her brother.

in/with relation to something

in connection with something:

She used the map to discover where she was in relation to her surroundings.

SMART Vocabulary: related words and phrases

Linking and relating

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relation noun (FAMILY MEMBER)

B1 [ C ]

a member of your family:

The funeral was attended by friends and relations.

She's a relation by marriage because she married my cousin.

Thesaurus: synonyms, antonyms, and examples

your relatives

relativeAll my relatives gather every year for a family reunion.
extended familyHe has a very large extended family.
relationShe is a distant relation of his, though I don't quite remember how.
kinHe remained true to his kin.
mother's/father's side (of the family)I have aunts and uncles on my mother's side of the family.

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SMART Vocabulary: related words and phrases

Family: relations in general

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Idiom

have (sexual) relations (with someone)

(Definition of relation from the Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary & Thesaurus © Cambridge University Press)

relation | American Dictionary

relation

noun

/rɪˈleɪ·ʃən/

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connection or similarity:

[ U ] There was little relation between the book and the movie.

Relations are the connections between people, groups, organizations, or countries:

[ pl ] diplomatic relations

[ pl ] business/economic relations

[ C ]

a person who is a member of the same family as another person:

On our trip, we visited friends and relations on both sides of the family.

Idiom

in relation to something

(Definition of relation from the Cambridge Academic Content Dictionary © Cambridge University Press)

Examples of relation

relation

Variables within time points were permitted to correlate; however, these relations are not shown to simplify presentation.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

The screening system permitted a population approach for quantification of changes in seed population thermal behaviour in relation to dormancy loss.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

Order is maintained by two means: direct management of the relations of the players and indirect structuring of the terms of play.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

Given the qualitative nature of the survey, the results were interpreted and put in relation to existing estimates in the literature.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

Decline in soil organic carbon and total nitrogen in relation to tillage, stubble management and rotation.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

As such, ethnicity as ideology provides a psychological formula which mitigates the uncertainties of state- society relations.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

This operation takes a minimal tree as input and returns the mirror image of that tree as output, preserving hierarchical relations.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

They contrast with syntactic representations, which are structured in terms of lexical heads and grammatical functions or relations.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

She argues that these differences are the reflex of different underlying representations for the two types of possessor relations.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

Analogously to the previous example, these constraints can be represented by rational relations.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

As a main success factor, all of the farmers reported the intensity of relations between the self-harvesters and the farmers.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

There was a significant relation between reaction times on the identification task and past burden of illness, particularly past number of depressions.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

Harmonic functions have an interesting relation to random walks.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

Part of understanding those artifacts, then, is recovering that world through identifying the basic structures of relation between the person and the ' object ' of worship.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

The opposite direction of this implication, that is, the completeness of the logical relations with respect to contextual equivalence remains future work.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

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