affinity
Meanings
noun
- A natural attraction or feeling of kinship to a person or thing.
- A family relationship through marriage of a relative (e.g. sister-in-law), as opposed to consanguinity (e.g. sister).
- A kinsman or kinswoman of a such relationship; one who is affinal.
- The fact of and manner in which something is related to another.
- Any romantic relationship.
- A love interest; a paramour.
- Any passionate love for something.
- Resemblances between biological populations, suggesting that they have a common origin, type or stock.
- Structural resemblances between minerals; resemblances that suggest that they are of a common origin or type.
- An attractive force between atoms, or groups of atoms, that contributes towards their forming bonds.
- The attraction between an antibody and an antigen
- A tendency to keep a task running on the same processor in a symmetric multiprocessing operating system to reduce the frequency of cache misses.
Pronunciation
Word forms
Etymology
From Middle English affinite, from Old French affinité. Ostensibly equivalent to affine + -ity. See also af-.
Synonyms
Derived words
Translations
This entry uses open data from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA/GFDL). Word forms are used for search and are not indexed as separate pages.