Skip to content
ARCHIEENGLISH
LearnPlayWordsRanking
  • Learn
  • Play
  • Words
  • Ranking
  • Mine
← Vocabulary

alignment

UK/əˈlaɪn.mənt/US/əˈlaɪn.mənt/
nounC1Common in everyday speech and writing · #7,289 of 15,258leans written

Other forms: alignments

Alignment is an arrangement in a straight line, or an agreement of aims. Wheel alignment, out of alignment, strategic alignment.

The physical sense is precise: a car with poor wheel alignment wears its tyres unevenly and pulls to one side. The business sense means the parts of an organisation pulling the same way, and it is one of the most overused words in management.

Definitions of alignment

  1. 1nounalignmentAn arrangement in a straight line, or an agreement of aims.C1

    “The stones in the ancient circle are in alignment with the sunrise on midsummer's day.”

alignment is an arrangement.

Where it comes from

French alignement comes from aligner, to put in line, from a ligne, to a line, from Latin linea.

  1. French

    alignement

  2. English, today

    alignment

From French alignement, by surface analysis, align + -ment.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

alignment in the wild

  • Sequence alignments are also used for non-biological sequences such as calculating the distance cost between strings in a natural language, or to display financial data.

    Sequence alignment

  • The coital alignment technique sex position is used primarily as a variant of the missionary position and is designed to maximize clitoral stimulation during sexual intercourse.

    Coital alignment technique

  • However, some regard a concept of alignment to be essential to role-playing, since they regard role-playing as an exploration of the themes of good and evil.

    Alignment (role-playing games)

  • Structural alignment can therefore be used to infer evolutionary relationships between proteins that share very little common sequence.

    Structural alignment

  • Structural alignments can compare two sequences or multiple sequences.

    Structural alignment

1 / 3

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

  • align