How to spell relation

hear itre·la·tion/rɪ'leɪʃən/nounSilent and tricky

What it means: A person connected by blood or marriage.

In a sentence: My cousin is a relation in my family.

The part people get wrong

Watch for an unstressed vowel that is hard to hear. Often misspelled as relaton or realtion.

Same family: relating, related, relational, relationship. If you can spell one, the shared part carries to the others.

Where it comes from: Relation comes from Latin 'relatio', meaning 'a bringing back, report, or reference'. In legal English, this idea of 'referring back' turned into the technical doctrine where an act is treated as if it happened at an earlier time.

Patterns it uses: The unstressed vowel (schwa) · -tion, -sion or -cian?

Try spelling it

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Words like this

direction · operation · connection · location · creation · communication · position · collection

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