# attraction

Pronunciation: say "uh-TRAK-shuhn" /əˈtɹækʃn̩/

## Noun

1. An event, location, or business that tends to draw interest from visitors and, often, local residents.
   - Simple: A place, event, or business that many people want to visit.
   - _The old lighthouse remains the island's most popular attraction._
   - _The festival has grown into a major attraction, drawing crowds from three states._
2. Sexual or romantic desire, especially for a particular person or type of person.
   - Simple: A strong feeling of liking someone in a romantic or sexual way.
   - _The attraction between the two leads is what carries the entire film._
   - _He admitted to a longstanding attraction to his college roommate._
3. The feeling of being drawn to something, whether a person, place, idea, or activity.
   - Simple: The feeling of being pulled toward something you like or want.
   - _Her attraction to the old farmhouse was immediate, despite its run-down condition._
   - _His attraction to risky ventures has shaped his entire career._
4. The tendency of one thing to pull or draw another toward itself.
   - Simple: The power something has to pull other things toward it.
   - _Gravitational attraction holds the planets in orbit around the sun._
   - _The bright petals give the flower a strong attraction for passing bees._
5. In chess, the sacrifice of pieces in order to expose the opposing king to attack.
   - Simple: In chess, giving up pieces on purpose to pull the other player's king into danger.
   - _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._
6. An 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.
   - Simple: A grammar mistake where a word copies something from the wrong word near it, like a verb matching the wrong noun.
   - _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._

## 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.

Source: DictionaryAI, https://dictionaryai.com/define/attraction (written from Wiktionary data, CC BY-SA 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).