Affinity

How to spell affinity

8 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce affinity

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does affinity mean?

1. nounA natural liking, attraction, or close connection between people or things.

Affinity in a sentence

• She felt a strong affinity for coastal towns and quiet harbours.

• His affinity with numbers made the accounting role an easy fit.

Where does affinity come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word goes back to the Latin affinitas, which meant a relationship by marriage, and behind that stood the adjective affinis, literally 'bordering on' or 'adjoining'. That term was built from ad, meaning 'to' or 'near', and finis, meaning 'boundary' or 'border', so the original image was of two families whose lands or lives now touched at the edges. English took the word in the 1300s through Old French afinité, where it first described kinship created by marriage rather than by blood. Over the following centuries the meaning broadened from family ties to any natural liking, attraction, or close resemblance between people, things, or substances, which is how chemists later spoke of the affinity between elements. The single d of ad was absorbed into the following f, which is exactly why the modern spelling carries the doubled ff that writers so often miss, and the same finis root still sits inside familiar words such as 'finish' and 'define'.

How the word is built

• af- (assimilated form of ad-, 'to')
• fin (from finis: boundary, border)
• -ity (noun suffix)