Affine

//əˈfaɪn// adj, noun, verb

adj, noun, verb ·Uncommon ·College level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    A relative by marriage.

    "1970 [Routledge and Kegan Paul], Raymond Firth, Jane Hubert, Anthony Forge, Families and Their Relatives: Kinship in a Middle-Class Sector of London, 2006, Taylor & Francis (Routledge), page 135, The element of personal idiosyncracy may be expected to be most marked in regard to affines (i.e. those related by marriage) and particularly with the consanguines of affines, who are linked by still more tenuous bonds. There are many possible degrees of affinal relationship here, but broadly affines separate into two main types: spouse of consanguine of Ego, and consanguine of spouse of Ego—exemplified by my brother's wife, and my wife's brother."

  2. 2
    (anthropology) kin by marriage wordnet
Verb
  1. 1
    To refine. transitive

    "The next stage is remelting: the affined sugar is dissolved in hot water and the syrup formed is made alkaline by adding milk of lime."

  2. 2
    To set the CPU affinity of something transitive

    "affined the sequential regions to run only on CPU 0"

Adjective
  1. 1
    Assigning finite values to finite quantities. not-comparable
  2. 2
    Of or pertaining to a function expressible as f(⃑x)=A⃑x+⃑b (where A is a linear transformation and ⃑b is a constant), which, regarded as a transformation, maps parallel lines to parallel lines and finite points to finite points. not-comparable

    "Now, let P, Q, and R be three noncollinear points that are left fixed by an affine transformation T."

  3. 3
    Of two materials, having mutual affinity. comparable
Adjective
  1. 1
    (anthropology) related by marriage wordnet
  2. 2
    (mathematics) of or pertaining to the geometry of affine transformations wordnet

Synonyms

All synonyms
affinalaffinalin lawin-lawunmix

Example

More examples

"An affine algebraic group over a field k is a representable covariant functor from the category of commutative algebras over k to the category of groups such that the representing algebra is finitely generated."

Etymology

From Latin affinis (“connected with”).

Related phrases

affine arithmeticaffine combinationaffine differential geometryaffine geometryaffine groupaffine schemeaffine spaceaffine spanaffine transformationaffine varietyco-affineself-affine

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.