membership

Pluralmemberships

Formsmemberships, membershipping, membershipped

1. 1
   nouncountable or uncountable

   The state of belonging to a group or organization as one of its members.

   Membership in the union gives workers access to legal advice.

   He let his gym membership lapse over the winter.

   Similaraffiliation, subscription

   Note

   Built from member and the suffix -ship, the word names a standing rather than a person. Without an article it is the condition itself, as in the terms of membership. Counted, it becomes a particular holding, so one person can have memberships in clubs in three cities. Keep it apart from the members taken together: here membership is something you hold, not people you can count.

2. 2
   nounusually singular

   The whole body of people who belong to an organization, considered together.

   The society's membership has grown to over five thousand this year.

   Leaders surveyed the membership before changing the rules.

   Note

   Here the word stops naming a status and starts naming people, which is why a membership can grow, be surveyed or be asked to vote. It becomes plural only when several such bodies are meant at once. In the memberships of the state chapters elect delegates, each chapter's members act as a separate body.

3. 3
   noununcountable

   The fact of being one of the elements that belong to a particular set.

   Membership in a set is decided only by whether an element meets the set's defining condition.

   The algorithm checks each element's membership in the target set.

   Note

   Set theory's most basic relation holds between an element and a set that contains it, and is written x ∈ S. It is taken as primitive and left undefined, and the set operations are then defined from it. Unlike belonging to a club, it carries no dues and cannot lapse. A membership test simply answers yes or no.

4. 4
   verbtransitive

   To classify a person as belonging to a particular group or community.

   Conversation analysts study how callers membership the person on the other end of the line, often within the first few turns.

   Her transcripts show doctors membershipping patients as experts or novices depending on how each question is framed.

   Note

   A sociolinguist's verb, turned from the noun, for sorting that happens in the middle of talk. Malcolm Coulthard, writing in 1975, describes how a speaker must 'membership' a listener into one of several mutually exclusive boxes. When the topic changes, that listener must be re-membershipped. The final p doubles before an ending, giving membershipped and membershipping.

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