relate
Formsrelates, relating, related
- 1To feel a connection with someone or something because you understand or share their experience.
Like recognizing your own life in a stranger's words.
Listeners relate to songs that capture their own heartbreak.
Many viewers related to the film's honest portrayal of grief.
Similaridentify, empathize, connect, sympathize
Note
The sense of fellow feeling is built on to: one relates to a person, a song or an experience. It shares that preposition with the "interact" meaning, so a sentence like "I find it difficult to relate to others" can lean either way. Context decides whether the trouble lies in getting along or in feeling understood.
- 2To have a connection or link with something else.
The two theories relate in ways scholars are still exploring.
Crime rates often relate to wider economic conditions.
Similarconnect, link, associate
Note
A word with a twin: relate and refer are doublets, both from Latin referō, which is why refer can stand in for it here. Used without an object, it pairs naturally with to, as when patterns on a screen relate to pitch and volume. The connection simply exists, whereas in the transitive "connect" meaning someone actively makes it.
- 3To bring two or more things into a relation, association, or connection with each other.
Researchers relate diet to long-term health throughout the study.
She related the poem's imagery to events in the author's own life.
Similarconnect, link, associate, correlate
Oppositedissociate
- 4To tell or describe events or a story to someone in a vivid, detailed way.
Veterans often relate their wartime experiences to younger soldiers.
She related the details of the meeting to the board the next morning.
Similarrecount, tell, describe, narrate, report
Note
The storytelling sense stays closest to the Latin: relātus, from referō, "carry back; report." To relate something is to carry an account back to a listener, whether an old yarn or the circumstances of a journey. What is told is the direct object, and the listener, if named, follows to: you relate the story to someone.
- 5To interact or get along with other people.
Therapists study how patients relate to those around them.
He struggled to relate to colleagues after his long absence.
Similarinteract, connect, communicate
- 6
Less common meaning
- 7To bring back or restore something to a former condition.
Abate your zealous haste, till morrow next again / Both light of heaven and strength of men relate.
1590, Edmund Spenser, The Faerie QueeneNote
Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene (1590) asks for rest until the next day will "both light of heaven and strength of men relate." Here the verb keeps the literal "carry back" of the Latin behind the storytelling sense, applied to strength and light rather than to an account. The sense is obsolete, so read it as a period meaning. A modern writer would say restore.
Practice
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Origin
From Latin relātus, the perfect passive participle of referō ("to carry back; to report"), with the verb-forming suffix -ate. It is a doublet of refer, and related to words like infer, confer, and prefer.