correlation

American  

[kawr-uh-lay-shuhn, kor-] / ˌkɔr əˈleɪ ʃən, ˌkɒr- /

especially British, corelation

noun

• correlations
  plural

1. mutual relation of two or more things, parts, etc..

   Studies find a positive correlation between severity of illness and nutritional status of the patients.

   Synonyms:

   interconnection, interrelationship, interdependence, equivalence, parallelism, correspondence, similarity

2. the act of correlating or state of being correlated.

3. Statistics. the degree to which two or more attributes or measurements on the same group of elements show a tendency to vary together.

4. Physiology. the interdependence or reciprocal relations of organs or functions.

5. Geology. the demonstrable equivalence, in age or lithology, of two or more stratigraphic units, as formations or members of such.

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correlation British  

/ ˌkɒrɪˈleɪʃən /

noun

1. a mutual or reciprocal relationship between two or more things

2. the act or process of correlating or the state of being correlated

3. statistics the extent of correspondence between the ordering of two variables. Correlation is positive or direct when two variables move in the same direction and negative or inverse when they move in opposite directions

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Pop Culture

—Pearson correlation coefficient: a value between -1 and +1 that represents the relationship between two variables.

Other Word Forms

Derived Forms

• intercorrelation
  noun
• miscorrelation
  noun
• noncorrelation
  noun
• correlational
  adjective

Inflected Forms

Nouns

• correlations
  plural

Etymology

Origin of correlation

First recorded in 1555–65; from Medieval Latin: correlātiōn- (stem of correlātiō ); see cor-, relation

Explanation

Correlation is something that scientists are often trying to show––is there a correlation between smoking and poor health or between napping and productivity? How about daily flossing and good grades? Correlation derives from the Latin cor- 'together' and -relatio 'relation'––the word is all about things that go together. But beware: just because a study shows a correlation between two variables, it doesn't mean one necessarily causes the other. There is a significant correlation between going to high school and being a teenager, but that doesn't mean that going to high school causes you to be a teenager.

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

correlation correlations

And true to that name, my job at the Kennedy Center was to investigate the correlation between the arts economy and the economy of civic aspiration.

From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 3, 2026

Not only has private equity lagged the S&P 500 in recent years, its correlation with public markets is very high.

From MarketWatch ● Sep. 24, 2026

In part, that is because self-reported sleep measures often show poor correlation with objective assessments, making it difficult to capture real-world sleep patterns.

From Science Daily ● Sep. 24, 2026

I think there’s more to the high oil-bond correlation than chance.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 24, 2026

From the Coldwater site and another site, named Timberline, directly on the mountain, Johnston peered through a big, boxy instrument called a correlation spectrometer.

From "Mountain of Fire" by Rebecca E. F. Barone

That allowed the team to determine whether the two Z bosons displayed the correlations expected from quantum entanglement.

From Science Daily ● Sep. 20, 2026

It provides a unified—and somewhat badass—identity for a confusing set of weather correlations.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 27, 2026

But Mitchell wants you to make those correlations, too.

From Salon ● Aug. 20, 2026

But SpaceX’s stock actually has “almost no relationship” to Big Tech, according to DataTrek, which cited the 30-day trailing correlations of various stocks.

From MarketWatch ● Aug. 18, 2026

In 1993, a study by Rauscher et al. was published, which looked at the possible correlations between listening to different types of music and intelligence.

From "Music and the Child" by Natalie Sarrazin

Related Words

• interaction
• interrelationship
• parallel