Definition of "acquaintance" []

• Knowledge of a person acquired by a relationship less intimate than friendship. (noun)
• A relationship based on such knowledge: struck up an acquaintance with our new neighbor. (noun)
• A person whom one knows. (noun)
• Knowledge or information about something or someone: has a passing acquaintance with Chinese history. (noun)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "If we wished to maintain the view that there is no acquaintance with Self, we might argue as follows: We are acquainted with _acquaintance_, and we know that it is a relation."
• "Then I said that you and I were shocked to find Gladys being charged with witchcraft because we had some acquaintance with her—and then I had to rephrase that because the coroner had never heard of the word acquaintance and wanted to know what it meant."
• "An embarrassing question in any case, and doubly so under the circumstances, because my acquaintance is a very learned man, one of the three or four really first-class minds that Europe produced in his generation; and naturally I, as one of the unlearned, was inclined to regard his lightest word with reverence amounting to awe."