affinity means A natural attraction or feeling of kinship to a person or thing. It carries an Arena rating of 1835, earned across 34 head-to-head judged battles.
Among words judged in Lexicurio's Arena, affinity ranks #796 of 17,134 for Most Malleable Words, #1,557 of 17,127 for Words That Escaped Their Books, #1,583 of 17,126 for Most Elegant Words, #4,838 of 17,130 for Most Beautiful Words.
affinity is pronounced /əˈfɪnɪti/.
Why “affinity” is a great word
A spontaneous inclination of kinship or sympathy, whether for a person, an idea, or a thing. From Middle English affinite, from Old French affinité, from Latin affīnitās ("relationship by marriage, neighborhood"), from affīnis ("bordering on, related by marriage"), from ad- ("to") + fīnis ("border, end"), first recorded in English 1275–1325. Unlike "familiarity," which implies knowledge from prolonged exposure, or "propinquity," which is mere proximity in place or time, affinity is the unexplained, magnetic pull felt across any distance. It is the instant recognition in a stranger’s glance, the deep comfort with a writer’s particular cadence, or the gravitational ease with which one chemical compound seeks out another—a testament to the quiet, prearranged patterns underlying a seemingly random world.
Etymology
From Middle English affinite, from Old French affinité. Ostensibly equivalent to affine + -ity. See also af-.
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.e.g.“"Cut it short, sis, cut it short," he would growl at her if she started to murmur sweet "coo-coos" to her affinity stationed on the other end of the wire.” — 1916 August 7, The Electrical Experimenter, New York, page 248, column 3:
- 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.
- An automorphism of affine space.
Definitions & examples from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 3.0).
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