Association

1. n. Union of persons in a company or society for some particular purpose; as, the American Association for the Advancement of Science; a benevolent association. Specifically, as among the Congregationalists, a society, consisting of a number of ministers, generally the pastors of neighboring churches, united for promoting the interests of religion and the harmony of the churches.
2. n. The act of associating, or state of being associated; union; connection, whether of persons of things.
3. n. Mental connection, or that which is mentally linked or associated with a thing.

The word meanings were obtained from OPTED(The Online Plain Text English Dictionary), which is based on “The Project Gutenberg Etext of Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary” which is in turn based on the 1913 US Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary (See Project Gutenburg), as a text file.