similarity

UK/ˌsɪm.ɪˈlæɹ.ɪ.ti/US/ˌsɪm.əˈlæɹ.ə.ti/

nounB1+Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #9,553 of 15,258leans written

Other forms: similarities

A similarity is one of the ways in which two things are alike. A striking similarity, point out the similarity, bear a similarity to.

It is the countable partner of likeness: you list the points of similarity one by one. Similarity between is the usual construction, and similarity to when one thing is measured against another. Its opposite is difference.

Definitions of similarity

1nounsimilarityA way in which two things are alike.B1+
“There's a strong similarity between the two brothers, so people often mix them up.”

similarity is a likeness.

Where it comes from

French similarite comes from Latin similis, like. Simile, assimilate and simulate are relatives.

Proto-Indo-European
*sem-
French
similarité
English, today
similarity

From French similarité. Morphologically similar + ity

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

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similarity in the wild

Sequence similarity (usually amino-acid sequence) is one of the most common indicators of homology, or common evolutionary ancestry.
Protein family
Some frameworks for evaluating the significance of similarity between sequences use sequence alignment methods.
Protein family
In machine learning, common kernel functions such as the RBF kernel can be viewed as similarity functions.
Similarity measure
Research in cognitive psychology has taken a number of approaches to the concept of similarity.
Similarity (psychology)
The Jaccard index is a statistic used for gauging the similarity and diversity of sample sets.
Jaccard index

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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

similar

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