Relation1. (n.) The act of relating or telling; also, that which is related; recital; account; narration; narrative; as, the relation of historical events.
2. (n.) The state of being related or of referring; what is apprehended as appertaining to a being or quality, by considering it in its bearing upon something else; relative quality or condition; the being such and such with regard or respect to some other thing; connection; as, the relation of experience to knowledge; the relation of master to servant.
3. (n.) Reference; respect; regard.
4. (n.) Connection by consanguinity or affinity; kinship; relationship; as, the relation of parents and children.
5. (n.) A person connected by consanguinity or affinity; a relative; a kinsman or kinswoman.
6. (n.) The carrying back, and giving effect or operation to, an act or proceeding from some previous date or time, by a sort of fiction, as if it had happened or begun at that time. In such case the act is said to take effect by relation.
7. (n.) The act of a relator at whose instance a suit is begun.
Thesaurus Entries
about, absorption, affective meaning, affiliation, agnation, allegory, alliance, analogy, ancestry, anent, apropos, association, associations, balancing, bearing, blood, blood relationship, blood relative, brotherhood, brothership, capacity, carnal knowledge, character, cognation, coitus, coloring, common ancestry, common descent, comparative anatomy, comparative degree, comparative grammar, comparative judgment, comparative linguistics, comparative literature, comparative method, compare, comparing, comparison, concerning, condition, confrontation, confrontment, connection, connotation, consanguinity, consequence, contrast, contrastiveness, correlation, correspondence, cousinhood, cousinship, criminal conversation, dealings, delineation, denotation, description, distinction, distinctiveness, doings, drift, effect, embarrassment, enation, engagement, enmeshment, entanglement, essence, extension, fatherhood, filiation, force, fraternity, gist, grammatical meaning, idea, impact, implication, import, in relation to, inclusion, intension, interconnection, intercourse, interdependence, involution, involvement, kin, kindred, kinship, kinsman, kinswoman, lexical meaning, liaison, likening, link, links, literal meaning, matching, maternity, matrilineage, matriliny, matrisib, matrocliny, meaning, metaphor, motherhood, narration, narrative, opposing, opposition, overtone, parallelism, part, paternity, patrilineage, patriliny, patrisib, patrocliny, pertaining to, pertinence, pith, point, portrayal, position, practical consequence, propinquity, proportion, purport, quality, range of meaning, re, real meaning, recapitulation, recital, recitation, recountal, recounting, reference, referent, referring to, regarding, rehearsal, relations, relationship, relative, relevance, report, respecting, retelling, review, role, scope, semantic cluster, semantic field, sense, sex, sexual intercourse, sibship, significance, signification, significatum, signifie, simile, similitude, sisterhood, sistership, span of meaning, spirit, status, story, structural meaning, substance, sum, sum and substance, symbolic meaning, tale-telling, telling, tenor, tie, tie-in, ties of blood, totality of associations, transferred meaning, trope of comparison, truck, unadorned meaning, undertone, value, weighing, with regard to, with respect to, yarn spinning