comparison

Etymology

From Middle English comparisoun, from Old French comparison, from Latin comparātiō, from comparātus, perfect passive participle of comparō.

noun

1. The act of comparing or the state or process of being compared.
   to bring a thing into comparison with another;  there is no comparison between them
   Whether modern, industrial man is less or more warlike than his hunter-gatherer ancestors is impossible to determine. The machine gun is so much more lethal than the bow and arrow that comparisons are meaningless. 2013-07-20, “Old soldiers?”, in The Economist, volume 408, number 8845
2. An evaluation of the similarities and differences of one or more things relative to some other or each other.
   He made a careful comparison of the available products before buying anything.
   As sharp legal practitioners, no class of human beings can bear a comparison with them. 1841, Thomas Macaulay, Warren Hastings
   The miracles of our Lord and those of the Old Testament afford many interesting points of comparison. 1850, Richard Chenevix Trench, Notes on the Miracles of Our Lord
3. With a negation, the state of being similar or alike.
   There really is no comparison between the performance of today's computers and those of a decade ago.
4. (grammar) A feature in the morphology or syntax of some languages whereby adjectives and adverbs are inflected to indicate the relative degree of the property they define exhibited by the word or phrase they modify or describe.
   In English, adjectives and adverbs have three forms when making a comparison: the plain form "hot", the comparative form "hotter", and the superlative form "hottest".
5. That to which, or with which, a thing is compared, as being equal or like; illustration; similitude.
6. (rhetoric) A simile.
7. (phrenology) The faculty of the reflective group which is supposed to perceive resemblances and contrasts.