alliance
Pluralalliances
Pluralalliances
Formsalliances, alliancing, allianced
- 1A union of interests between families, states, or parties, especially families joined by marriage and states bound by treaty or league.
The marriage sealed an alliance between two powerful trading families.
Three nations entered into a military alliance against the empire.
Similarunion, pact, league, coalition, partnership
Note
Two constructions carry most of the weight here. Between names the parties joined: an alliance between church and state, or between two countries. An adjective in front names the kind of bond: matrimonial alliances join families, while military or political ones join states. Choosing the adjective is usually how a writer signals which of the two classic unions is meant.
- 2The condition of being allied or bound together with another in shared interest.
In alliance with neighboring kingdoms, the city enjoyed decades of security.
Their long alliance meant neither side feared betrayal.
Similarpartnership, association, union
Note
Ally with a suffix attached: Middle English alliaunce, from Old French aliance, built like ally + -ance, the ending that turns a verb into a state or an act. As a state, it takes no plural and usually no article, and its natural home is the phrase in alliance with, as in a city in alliance with its neighbors. Once it takes an article, it usually means a particular union.
- 3
- 4The persons or parties bound together as allies, taken as a single body.
The alliance gathered its leaders to plan a joint defense.
The alliance stood firm despite pressure from outside powers.
Similarcoalition, league, bloc, federation
Note
Here the word stops naming the bond and names the members, and it nearly always takes the definite article: the alliance gathered, the alliance stood firm. That article is the quickest way to tell it from the union itself. When you can swap in the allies without changing the sense, this is the meaning in play.
- 5A connection resembling that between families or states, founded on shared qualities or natural affinity.
Critics saw a deep alliance between the painter's style and the poet's verse.
There is a curious alliance between cold weather and clear thinking.
Similaraffinity, kinship, connection, bond
Note
The figurative stretch: ideas, principles and disciplines form alliances the way houses and nations do. Henry Longueville Mansel writes in 1860 of the alliance between logic and metaphysics. Charles John Smith's Synonyms Discriminated (1871) speaks of the alliance of the world's principles with those of the gospel. Both patterns work, alliance between X and Y and alliance of X with Y, and the meaning sits close to affinity.
Less common meanings
- 6A marriage, especially considered as a formal union between two families.
The alliance between the two families was celebrated for a week.
His daughter's alliance with the merchant's son secured the estate.
Note
The marriage meaning splits by region. In most English it sounds dated, but in Indian English it is still in use for a match between families. It grew out of the family strand of the union of families or states, so it keeps a sense of two households joined. Outside India, calling a wedding an alliance reads as old-fashioned or deliberately formal.
- 7A taxonomic grouping of several related orders of organisms, equivalent to a cohort in older classification.
Nineteenth-century naturalists assigned the ferns to a single alliance.
The alliance gathered several orders thought to share a common form.
Similarcohort
Note
A taxonomist's rank that has fallen out of use: older classifications called a group of related orders an alliance, the same rank that cohort names. When the word turns up in older natural history with this rank meaning, read it as cohort. In current writing, cohort is the term to use.
- 8To join or unite two parties by a formal bond or league.
The treaty would alliance the two crowns against their common foe.
He labored to alliance the rival factions before war broke out.
Note
A verb English tried and then dropped. Alliance once worked as a transitive verb, with regular forms alliances, alliancing and allianced. It is now obsolete, and ally does the same job in modern writing: the treaty would ally the two crowns. If you meet allianced in an old text, read it as allied, and do not use the verb yourself.
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Origin
From Middle English alliaunce, from Old French aliance (modern French alliance), equivalent to ally plus the suffix -ance.