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Affinity   /əfˈɪnəti/  /əfˈɪnɪti/   Listen
noun
Affinity  n.  (pl. affinities)  
1.
Relationship by marriage (as between a husband and his wife's blood relations, or between a wife and her husband's blood relations); in contradistinction to consanguinity, or relationship by blood; followed by with, to, or between. "Solomon made affinity with Pharaoh."
2.
Kinship generally; close agreement; relation; conformity; resemblance; connection; as, the affinity of sounds, of colors, or of languages. "There is a close affinity between imposture and credulity."
3.
Companionship; acquaintance. (Obs.) "About forty years past, I began a happy affinity with William Cranmer."
4.
(Chem.) That attraction which takes place, at an insensible distance, between the heterogeneous particles of bodies, and unites them to form chemical compounds; chemism; chemical or elective affinity or attraction.
5.
(Nat. Hist.) A relation between species or higher groups dependent on resemblance in the whole plan of structure, and indicating community of origin.
6.
(Spiritualism) A superior spiritual relationship or attraction held to exist sometimes between persons, esp. persons of the opposite sex; also, the man or woman who exerts such psychical or spiritual attraction.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Affinity" Quotes from Famous Books



... with two great qualities which made up for everything. She was patient and gentle. Mademoiselle Augustine, who was but just eighteen, was not like either her father or her mother. She was one of those daughters whose total absence of any physical affinity with their parents makes one believe in the adage: "God gives children." Augustine was little, or, to describe her more truly, delicately made. Full of gracious candor, a man of the world could have found no fault in the charming girl beyond a certain meanness of gesture or vulgarity ...
— At the Sign of the Cat and Racket • Honore de Balzac

... may be false,' rejoined the First; 'But I doubt they are Murderers! If they discover us, we are lost! As for me, my fate is certain: My affinity to the Prioress will be a sufficient crime to condemn me; and though till now these Vaults ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis

... political and religious reaction; and reaction often assumes the aspect of progress, nay, in some cases is identical with progress. Most of the poets, dramatists, and other writers of the Romantic School were, either by affinity or predilection, legitimists and neo-Catholics. Gothic art, mediaeval sentiment, the ancient monarchy and the ancient creed, were blended in their programme with the abrogation of the "unities," and a greater license of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various

... purples, that had surrounded him on a day in late autumn when he had walked for miles in loneliness and, again, had paused to look, receiving the scene ineffaceably, so that certain moods always made it rise before him. And linked by some thread of affinity with these pictures, the face of the young girl he had met that afternoon rose before him. Not as he had just seen her, but as he had seen her, for the first time, the night before at the concert. Her face came back to him with the larch-boughs and the spring of water and the lonely hills, ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick

... contraction in the limbs, trembling, &c. They were weakened also in the eyes and pit of the stomach. From those related to her by blood, she could draw more benefit than from others, and, when very weak, from them only; probably on account of a natural affinity of temperament. She could not bear to have around her nervous and sick persons; those from whom she could gain ...
— Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 • S.M. Fuller


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