considered and judged by being compared with something else

referring to an earlier noun, sentence or part of a sentence

In ‘the man who came’, ‘who’ is a relative pronoun and ‘who came’ is a relative clause.

that exists or that has a particular quality only when compared with something else

They now live in relative comfort.

We won the game with relative ease.

Given the failure of the previous plan, this turned out to be a relative success.

It's all relative though, isn't it? We never had any money when I was a kid and $500 was a fortune to us.

a person who is in the same family as somebody else

a thing that belongs to the same group as something else

The ibex is a distant relative of the mountain goat.

He believes that interior design is the poor relative of architecture.

LEARNit Dictionary