a primitive method of determining a person's guilt or innocence by subjecting the accused person to dangerous or painful tests believed to be under divine control; escape was usually taken as a sign of innocence
a positive feeling of liking; "he had trouble expressing the affection he felt"; "the child won everyone's heart"; "the warmness of his welcome made us feel right at home"
a natural attraction or feeling of kinship; "an affinity for politics"; "the mysterious affinity between them"; "James's affinity with Sam"
inherent resemblance between persons or things
the force attracting atoms to each other and binding them together in a molecule; "basic dyes have an affinity for wool and silk"
(immunology) the attraction between an antigen and an antibody
a close connection marked by community of interests or similarity in nature or character; "found a natural affinity with the immigrants"; "felt a deep kinship with the other students"; "anthropology's kinship with the humanities"
(biology) state of relationship between organisms or groups of organisms resulting in resemblance in structure or structural parts; "in anatomical structure prehistoric man shows close affinity with modern humans"
(anthropology) kinship by marriage or adoption; not a blood relationship
a party of people assembled to promote sociability and communal activity
friendly and pleasant; "a sociable gathering"
inclined to or conducive to companionship with others; "a sociable occasion"; "enjoyed a sociable chat"; "a sociable conversation"; "Americans are sociable and gregarious"
the organic phenomenon in which one of a pair of alleles present in a genotype is expressed in the phenotype and the other allele of the pair is not
the state that exists when one person or group has power over another; "her apparent dominance of her husband was really her attempt to make him pay attention to her"
expressing or feeling or resulting from sympathy or compassion or friendly fellow feelings; disposed toward; "sympathetic to the students' cause"; "a sympathetic observer"; "a sympathetic gesture"
(of characters in literature or drama) evoking empathic or sympathetic feelings; "the sympathetic characters in the play"
of or relating to the sympathetic nervous system; "sympathetic neurons"; "sympathetic stimulation"
the act of subjecting to experimental test in order to determine how well something works; "they agreed to end the testing of atomic weapons"
an examination of the characteristics of something; "there are laboratories for commercial testing"; "it involved testing thousands of children for smallpox"