adjective, noun
adjective (formal)
1 considered and judged by being compared with sth else:
the relative merits of the two plans
2 ~ (to sth) considered according to its position or connection with sth else:
the position of the sun relative to the earth
3 [onlybeforenoun] that exists or that has a particular quality only when compared with sth else:
They now live in relative comfort (= compared with how they lived before). * Given the failure of the previous plan, this turned out to be a relative success. * (spoken) It's all relative though, isn't it? We never had any money when I was a kid and $500 was a fortune to us.
compareABSOLUTE
4 ~ to sth (formal) having a connection with sth; referring to sth:
the facts relative to the case
5 (grammar) referring to an earlier noun, sentence or part of a sentence:
In 'the man who came', 'who' is a relative pronoun and 'who came' is a relative clause.
Part of speech: noun
1 a person who is in the same family as sb else
SYNRELATION:
a close / distant relative * her friends and relatives
2 a thing that belongs to the same group as sth else:
The ibex is a distant relative of the mountain goat.
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About this entry
This is a English–English dictionary entry.
Sourced from Main Dictionary in Lughet's collection.
This word also appears under other sources in Lughet's collection — see the list below.
This entry for relative is sourced from Main Dictionary, one of the dictionaries and corpora merged into Lughet.
Is relative a noun, verb, or something else?
In this entry, relative is tagged as noun.
Does relative appear elsewhere on Lughet?
Yes — relative appears under other sources or language pairs in Lughet's collection. See the list below.
What is Lughet?
Lughet is a free trilingual dictionary covering nearly five million entries across Uyghur, Chinese, and English, drawn from more than ten source dictionaries and corpora.
