align
Formsaligns, aligning, aligned
- 1To adjust objects so that they range or come into a straight line.
Carpenters align the boards carefully before nailing them down.
She aligned the picture frames along the hallway wall.
Similarstraighten
- 2To form a line, or to fall into line, with others.
The dancers align along the edge of the stage as the music begins.
Soldiers aligned for inspection at dawn.
Note
The root is the line itself. Latin lineare, "make straight," comes from linea, "line," and behind that lies līneus, "flaxen." The Middle English ancestor alynen meant something else entirely: "copulate." In this intransitive use, the people or things do the lining up themselves. When someone else arranges them, the verb takes an object, as in the "bring into line" meaning.
- 3To identify with, match, or support the views, behavior, or goals of another person, organization, or country.
Several smaller parties align with the ruling coalition.
The senator aligned with environmental groups on the new bill.
Oppositeoppose
Note
Taking sides comes in two constructions, both with with. A party can align with a coalition or align itself with one, and the reflexive form stresses that the choice is deliberate. Ally and side with are close neighbors. Side with suits a single dispute, while align, like ally, usually suggests a lasting association of views or interests.
Smaller nations often align themselves with a powerful neighbor.
Few voters want to align themselves with either camp.
- 4To organize or arrange in a consistent, defined way, sometimes in an abstract sense.
Good managers align team goals with the company's broader strategy.
She aligned the project timeline with the budget cycle.
Similarcoordinate, harmonize, synchronize
- 5To store data so that each item begins at a memory offset that is a multiple of the word size, matching the memory architecture.
The compiler aligns each structure member to a four-byte boundary.
Programmers align large arrays to cache-line boundaries for speed.
Note
Hardware is the reason for this sense. Data whose starting address is not a multiple of the word size can be slower to read, or can cause a fault outright. The verb usually takes to and a boundary: align to four bytes, align to a word boundary. The results are described as aligned or misaligned.
- 6To arrange DNA, RNA, or protein sequences in a line so that their regions of similarity match up.
Researchers align the homologous sequences before building a phylogenetic tree.
The software aligned thousands of reads against the reference genome.
Note
Biologists line sequences up to compare them residue by residue. They insert gaps where needed so that regions of evolutionary or structural similarity fall into the same columns. A new sequence is typically aligned against a reference, or several sequences are aligned with one another. Unlike the knowledge-base sense, what is matched here is position, not identity.
- 7To identify entities in different knowledge bases that refer to the same real-world object.
Data engineers align entities across the two product catalogs before merging them.
The pipeline aligned author records from several bibliographic databases.
Similarmatch
Note
Information science borrows the verb for matching records rather than objects. Two knowledge bases may describe the same person or product under different identifiers, labels or schemas. Aligning them means deciding which entries denote the same real-world thing. Nothing is moved into a line here: the line is a correspondence, and drawing it is the work that comes before merging or cross-referencing.
Practice
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Origin
It comes from Old French alignier (from a- plus lignier), which goes back to Latin lineare, 'to make straight', from linea, 'line'. This traces to linum, meaning 'flax', and likely ultimately to a Proto-Indo-European root.