comparison

Here the word names a finished judgment, something a person makes or draws, such as a careful comparison of products before buying. Richard Chenevix Trench's "points of comparison" (1850) names the particular features weighed against each other. When with follows, it introduces the yardstick, as in Macaulay's "bear a comparison with them" (1841).

The word has come down from Latin with little change: Middle English comparisoun, through Old French comparison, from Latin comparātiō, a noun built on the verb comparō. In this sense it names the act itself, so it pairs with verbs of setting things side by side. A thing is brought into comparison with another. In the plural it means attempts at comparing, as when The Economist in 2013 found the machine gun and the bow so unlike that "comparisons are meaningless."

A sense that lives only in the negative: there is no comparison between them, or a remake bears no comparison with the original. The phrase does not say the two things cannot be compared. It says one so far outstrips the other that setting them side by side is pointless, as with today's computers against those of a decade ago. Without the no, the word falls back into the evaluation sense.

Grammarians use the word for the whole system of degree, not for any single form. English shows it in three steps: the plain form hot, the comparative hotter, and the superlative hottest. Keep the terms apart. Comparison is the feature, and the comparative is only its middle step, so a language has comparison while a word is in the comparative.

Here the word stands for the likeness itself, the thing held up beside another, close to an illustration or similitude. The King James Bible of 1611 uses it this way alongside liken: "with what comparison shall we compare it?" Compare and comparison sit side by side in that line, which shows clearly that the noun names the image rather than the act.

Rhetoric gives the word a narrower job: it names a figure of speech, the simile, in which one thing is openly likened to another, as grief to an unending winter. It differs in scope from the likeness itself. There the word means the image chosen; here it means the whole figure that carries that image.

A term from nineteenth-century phrenology, which divided the mind into faculties and assigned each to its own organ in the brain. Comparison belonged to the reflective group and was held to perceive resemblances, analogies and contrasts. Use it only when writing about phrenology itself. The faculty was only "supposed" to exist, and the word carries that theory with it.