Relates

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. Has a link or association with something else ; tells a story or shares information about events or experiences
2. Is connected or involved with a person, thing, or idea ; communicates or recounts details or events to others
3. Shows or demonstrates a relationship to something ; narrates or describes incidents or knowledge to an audience

Etymology: The verb "relates" is just the third-person singular form of "relate," so the real story belongs to "relate" itself. It comes from the Latin "referō," which meant "carry back," and its past participle "relātus" gave English a verb that first meant to bring a thing back to something else, and only later to report or tell. That is also why "refer" and "relate" are doublets: two English words that descend from the same Latin source by different routes, one through French and one taken more directly from Latin. The sense of "connected to" grew out of the idea of carrying one thing back to another. To relate two things is to bring them into a line of connection, and the sense of recounting events comes from the same movement, bringing a story back to a listener. The word also belongs to a family of Latin-derived verbs that share the same "-fer" core, including "infer," "confer," "defer," "prefer," and "collate," each built on a different prefix that changed the sense of "carry."

Synonyms: connects, links, associates, correlates, ties

Antonyms: disconnects, separates, dissociates