relative

Pluralrelatives

1. 1
   nouncountable

   A person connected to you by blood, marriage, or adoption; a member of your family.

   Several relatives traveled across the country for the family reunion.

   He is my only living relative on my mother's side.

   Similarrelation, kinsman, kinswoman

2. 2
   adjective

   Considered in connection with or in comparison to something else, rather than on its own.

   The relative importance of each task became clear once we set a deadline.

   Comfort is a relative idea that depends on what you are used to.

   Similarcomparative

   Oppositeabsolute

   Note

   The everyday sense, and the one closest to its Latin root: relātus, from referō, "to carry back." A relative judgment is carried back to something else and measured there. Before a noun it often softens a verdict. When Phil McNulty called Liverpool's 2012 season a relative disappointment, he meant a letdown only by the standard of what they had hoped for. It does not take more or most.

3. 3
   adjective

   Expressed in relation to another item or reference point, rather than in absolute or complete form.

   In the spreadsheet, a relative reference shifts when you copy the formula to another cell.

   Programmers often use relative file paths so a project stays portable across machines.

   Oppositeabsolute

   Note

   A computing term whose opposite is absolute. A relative URL or path names a location starting from where you already are. On its own, /images/pic.jpg points nowhere. Read against http://example.com/index.html, it resolves to http://example.com/images/pic.jpg. The pair relative and absolute runs through this vocabulary, from paths and links to spreadsheet references, and choosing the relative form is what lets a project move without breaking.

4. 4
   nounfigurativelycountable

   A thing that is kindred or closely related to another, treated as belonging to the same group or family.

   The tomato is a relative of the deadly nightshade.

   These two languages are distant relatives that share an ancient root.

   Similarcousin

5. 5
   adjective

   Referring back to an antecedent; introducing a clause that modifies an earlier noun or pronoun.

   The relative pronoun 'who' links the description to the person it modifies.

   English forms a relative clause with words like 'that', 'which', and 'whom'.

   Note

   The grammarian's use keeps the Latin "carrying back" of the everyday comparative sense most literally: a relative word points back to an antecedent. It appears almost entirely in fixed pairings such as relative pronoun and relative clause. Used alone as a noun, a relative is far more likely to mean a family member, except in the Bantu word class.

6. 6
   adjective

   Describing two musical keys that share the same key signature but differ in being major or minor.

   The relative minor of C major is A minor.

   Composers often slip into the relative minor for a darker mood.

   Note

   Every major key has a relative minor, and every minor key has a relative major. The two share a key signature, and their tonics lie a minor third apart. C major and A minor, for instance, both use no sharps or flats. The word almost always appears in the set phrases relative minor and relative major, which name a key by its partner.

7. 7
   adjective

   Liable to vary according to circumstances or other factors, rather than being fixed; conditional.

   Beauty standards are relative and shift from one culture to another.

   Whether a salary counts as high is relative to the local cost of living.

   Similarsubjective, dependent, conditional

   Oppositeabsolute

8. 8
   adverbUS

   Alternative form of relatively. Nonstandard; relatively is the usual form in writing.

   Prices have stayed relative stable over the past year.

   The new engine runs relative quiet for its size.

   Note

   A US usage in which the bare form does the work of relatively, almost always directly before another adjective: a relative small institution, a relative small number. It counts as a slip in careful speech. In a 1974 hearing of the United States Senate Select Committee on Small Business, Professor Brazer was asked to rephrase "the relative small number of cases" and accepted the correction. In edited prose, write relatively.

9. 9
   nouncountable

   In certain Bantu languages, a word that describes a noun but inflects like a relative clause rather than like a true adjective.

   In many Bantu languages, a relative agrees with its noun through a set of prefixes.

   Linguists classify these relatives separately from ordinary adjectives.

   Note

   Here the grammatical term becomes a noun naming a word class. Descriptions of certain Bantu languages set relatives apart from true adjectives because they inflect the way a relative clause does, not the way an adjective agrees with its noun. In this technical setting, the plural relatives refers to a category of words, never to family members.

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