Other forms: correlations
A correlation is a link between two things that move together — when one goes up, the other goes up too. Hours of sleep and exam marks; ice cream sales and sunburn.
The phrase you will meet everywhere is correlation is not causation, and the ice cream is the reason why: the sun raises both numbers, and the cone burns nobody. The word takes BETWEEN for the pair — a correlation between smoking and heart disease — while the verb correlate takes WITH: height correlates with shoe size. Statisticians measure it on a scale from -1 to +1, where a negative correlation means one rises as the other falls, and a strong correlation means the pattern is tight. Outside statistics, a correlation is any close connection between two things. The adjective is correlated.
1nouncorrelationA link between two things such that changes in one go together with changes in the other.~83%
“There is a strong correlation between income and life expectancy.”
2nouncloseA close connection or matching between two things.~17%
“He noticed a correlation between the two witnesses' accounts.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 13 sentences found in the wild and placed 12 of them on a sense (1 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
correlation is a relationship between two things.
Correlation came into English from Middle French correlation. It is put together the way English builds relation and separation: correlate plus -ion, the ending that turns an action into a thing you can point at and count.
Middle French
corrélation
English, today
correlation
From Middle French corrélation. Morphologically correlate + -ion.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA