affection

Pluralaffections (some meanings)

Formsaffections, affectioning, affectioned

1. 1
   noununcountable

   A feeling of love or strong attachment toward someone or something.

   Years of shared hardship deepened their affection for one another.

   He always spoke of his hometown with unmistakable affection.

   Similarfondness, love, warmth, tenderness, attachment

   Oppositedislike, hatred, hostility

   Note

   The everyday sense, and the one most readers mean. It takes for before its object, as in "his affection for her" in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (1813). It is often something shown or given, as when couples are told to show each other more affection. George Bernard Shaw's Getting Married (1908) can even question the "natural" affection supposed between husband and wife, parent and child.

2. 2
   nouncountable

   An emotion; a feeling or natural impulse that acts on the mind and sways it.

   Philosophers once sorted the affections of the soul into love, hate, hope, and fear.

   Pity is an affection that arises naturally at the sight of suffering.

   Similaremotion, feeling, passion

   Note

   Any feeling at all can be meant here, not just fondness. Swedenborg's Heaven and Hell, in the 1905 translation, speaks of one affection in joy, another in grief, another in compassion. The plural is common, and it blurs into the loving sense: Mark Cocker's "our affections for wild animals" in The Guardian Weekly (2013) leans toward liking. When you mean pity or fear, emotion or feeling avoids the ambiguity.

3. 3
   nouncountable

   The state of being affected; a change in someone's emotional state arising in response to a thought or perception.

   The therapist tracked each affection that surfaced as the patient recalled the event.

   Every perception leaves some affection on the mind, however slight.

   Similaremotion, feeling

4. 4
   noununcountable

   The act of affecting something, or of acting upon it.

   In classical physics, the affection of a body by an outside force changes its motion.

   He described perception as the affection of the senses by the world around us.

   Note

   The root meaning, built just as it looks: affect plus -ion, reaching English through Old French from Latin affectiō. Here the word names the acting upon, not any feeling, and it belongs to careful, technical prose about forces and the senses. Its mirror image is the state of being affected, and the emotional meanings sit closer to that passive side.

5. 5
   nouncountable

   An attribute, quality, or property of something; a condition it is in.

   Geometers treat curvature as an affection of a curve.

   In old philosophy, heat and cold were counted among the affections of matter.

   Similarproperty, attribute, quality

   Note

   Here the word means a property something has, not anything it feels. Older mathematics used it this way for features of figures and propositions, and Robert Simson's Euclid's Elements (1756) uses it in defining the porism. Keep this in mind when reading old geometry or natural philosophy: an affection of a curve is a trait of the curve, not an emotion.

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