Other forms: reunions
A reunion is a gathering that brings back together people who have been apart for years. Twenty years after school, forty of you in a hotel function room with name badges. Or the whole family in one house at Christmas, cousins you last saw as toddlers now taller than you.
The word carries the separation inside it: without the years apart it is not a reunion, just a party. It takes WITH for the person — a reunion with her birth mother, a reunion with old bandmates. Class reunion, family reunion, school reunion and reunion tour are all fixed pairings you will meet again and again. There is a bigger, colder use as well: the reunion of a divided country, the reunion of two churches. The verb is reunite, and reunited is the word under the airport video that makes everyone cry.
1nounreunionA gathering of people who have been apart for a long time.
“She flew home for the family reunion and did not recognise half the cousins.”
synonyms: get-together, homecoming
2nounreunificationThe act of coming together again after being separated.
“The reunion of the two halves of the country took decades to feel real.”
synonyms: reunification
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
reunion is a gathering.
Reunion came from Middle French reunion (modern French réunion), built on re- — a joining that happens a second time. The island of Réunion in the Indian Ocean is the very same word, a doublet of it: a place name that means, plainly, a coming back together.
Middle French
reunion
English, today
reunion
From Middle French reunion (modern French réunion). by surface analysis, re- + union. a doublet of Réunion.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA