relation

Noun

relation (countable and uncountable, plural relations)

1. The manner in which two things may be associated.
   • The relation between diet and health is complex.
   • There's no linear relation between mortality and size.

   Synonyms:

   connection, link, relationship

2. A member of one's extended family; a relative.
   • Yes, he's a relation of mine, but only a distant one.
3. (in plural) A relationship; the manner in which and tone with which people or states, etc. interact.
   • the foreign relations of the United States
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, […]c. 1503–1512, John Skelton, Ware the Hauke; republished in John Scattergood, editor, John Skelton: The Complete English Poems, 1983, →OCLC, page 62, lines 29–30, 33–35

   Synonyms:

   recounting, tell

5. A set of ordered tuples.
   • […]Signs are, first of all, physical things: for example, chalk marks on a blackboard, pencil or ink marks on paper, sound waves produced in a human throat. According to Reichenbach, "What makes them signs is the intermediary position they occupy between an object and a sign user, i.e., a person."...1974, Thomas S. Szasz, M.D., chapter 7, in The Myth of Mental Illness, →ISBN, page 107
   1. A set of ordered pairs; a binary relation.
      • Equality is a symmetric relation, while divisibility is not.
6. A set of tuples, implemented as a table in a relational database.
   • This relation uses the customer's social security number as a key.
7. A statement of equality of two products of generators, used in the presentation of a group.
8. A subobject of a product of objects.
9. (in plural, often, often collocated: sexual relation) The act of intercourse.
   • have relations with
   • have sexual relations with