attraction
Pluralattractions
- 1An event, location, or business that tends to draw interest from visitors and, often, local residents.
The old lighthouse remains the island's most popular attraction.
The festival has grown into a major attraction, drawing crowds from three states.
Similardraw, sight, highlight, landmark, magnet
Note
Unlike the senses for a pull or a feeling, this one is always countable: you visit an attraction, compare attractions, call one the town's major attraction. It stretches from something as large as a new mall to a single ride inside a theme park, like Disney World's Star Tours. It pairs naturally with adjectives of rank and draw, such as major, popular, and main.
- 2Sexual or romantic desire, especially for a particular person or type of person.
The attraction between the two leads is what carries the entire film.
He admitted to a longstanding attraction to his college roommate.
Similarchemistry, desire, infatuation, passion
Note
Narrowed from the general feeling of being drawn, this is the meaning bare attraction usually carries in talk about people. Someone who says "I don't experience attraction the way most people do" means sexual or romantic attraction, and needs no qualifier. Add to when there is a particular object, as in attraction to men or an attraction to a colleague. That is the construction that names whom the desire is for.
- 3The feeling of being drawn to something, whether a person, place, idea, or activity.
Her attraction to the old farmhouse was immediate, despite its run-down condition.
His attraction to risky ventures has shaped his entire career.
Similarfascination, liking, affinity, penchant, interest
- 4The tendency of one thing to pull or draw another toward itself.
Gravitational attraction holds the planets in orbit around the sun.
The bright petals give the flower a strong attraction for passing bees.
Oppositerepulsion
Note
The word carries its own picture: Latin attrahō, from ad "toward" and trahō "draw," so an attraction is literally a drawing-toward. In physics it names the pull between bodies or particles, such as gravitation, the force between opposite charges, or magnetism, and its opposite is repulsion. It works as a mass noun (the attraction of the Earth's gravity) and as a count noun for a particular pull.
- 5In chess, the sacrifice of pieces in order to expose the opposing king to attack.
Her winning combination relied on attraction: a queen sacrifice that dragged the king to an exposed square.
Commentators praised the grandmaster's bold use of attraction in the final round.
Note
A chess tactic named for what it does to the king. Material is given up to drag the enemy king onto a square where a follow-up combination can strike, and occasionally another piece is the target instead. It is closely related to the decoy motif: in both, a sacrifice lures a piece onto the square the attacker has chosen.
- 6An error in language production in which a feature of one word is incorrectly extended to another, as when a verb agrees with a nearby noun rather than its subject.
Attraction is at work when a speaker says 'the key to the cabinets are missing.'
Reading her draft aloud helped her catch attraction in several long sentences, where verbs had drifted toward the nearest plural noun.
Note
Linguists usually call it agreement attraction, because number agreement is where it shows most. The verb is pulled toward a plural noun sitting between it and its singular subject, as in the key to the cabinets are missing. Psycholinguistics studies it closely, since the slip reveals how speakers track a subject while building a sentence.
Practice
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Origin
It comes from Middle English attraccioun, borrowed from Old French attraction, from Latin attractio, based on the past participle of attrahō ('to draw toward'), which combines ad ('to') and trahō ('to pull'). It can be seen as attract plus the suffix -ion.