Causation is one thing genuinely making another happen, rather than the two merely turning up together. Smoking and lung cancer is causation. Ice-cream sales and drownings, both climbing every July, are not.
The line every statistics class repeats is that correlation is not causation: two figures can rise together because a third thing lifts them both, or by plain luck. In law, causation is something you have to prove — that the driver's speed produced the injury, and did not merely come before it — and a claim can fail on causation alone. Philosophers have argued for centuries about what causation even is, since nobody has ever seen it; you see one event, then another. The adjective is causal, with one L, and it is a different word from casual — one letter, and the sentence changes completely. Use cause for the thing that acts, and causation for the relationship between things.
1nouncausationThe relationship in which one thing genuinely brings another about.~79%
“The study shows a link, but it stops well short of proving causation.”
2nounlawIn law, proof that a person's act actually produced the harm complained of.~21%
“The claim failed on causation rather than on negligence.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 14 sentences found in the wild and placed 14 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
causation is a relationship between events.
Causation is cause with -ation bolted on: the ending that turns an action into the name of its process, the way form gives formation and create gives creation.
Proto-Italic
*kaussā
Latin
causa — reason, sake, cause
Old French
cause — a cause, a thing
Middle English
cause
English
cause
English, today
causation
From cause + ation. cause From Middle English cause (also with the sense of “a thing”), borrowed from Old French cause (“a cause, a thing”), borrowed from Latin causa (“reason, sake, cause”), from Proto-Italic kaussā, which is of unknown origin. a doublet of chose*. See accuse, excuse, recuse, ruse. Displaced native intinga.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA