Union

Union

Noun · /ˈjuːniən/ · the act or state of joining two or more things into one

Definition

Union is the act or result of joining two or more things, people, or groups together to form a single entity. It can describe a political union of states, a trade union of workers, the union of two companies through a merger, or the mathematical union of two sets. At its core, union always implies that separate things have come together and now function as one — without necessarily losing their individual identities entirely. The United Kingdom is a union. A joint venture is a union. A marriage is a union.

Origin

Union comes from the Latin unio, meaning oneness or a single large pearl — from unus, one. The pearl sense was specific: a single perfect gem was called a union because it was complete in itself, whole. By the fourteenth century in English, union had extended to mean any joining into one. The political sense — a union of states or kingdoms — appears by the sixteenth century. The trade union sense — workers united to negotiate collectively — developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries alongside industrial labour movements.