membership

plural memberships

1. countableuncountableThe state of being a member of a group or organization.

   He has memberships in clubs in three cities.

   3 more examples

   The terms of membership agreement were vague.

   But when Krystal McConnell and Ashley Flynn were named deep in the heart of the '80s the thing was cuteness, feminine delicacy raised to an aesthetic paradigm. --- And everyone named according to a particular version of the pedigree fantasy. Ashley : transplanted Southern privilege, a destiny lying in sorority mixers and a marriage of health club memberships, state-of-the-art appliances and night courses in nouvelle cuisine.

   1999, Andrew Pyper, chapter 10, in Lost Girls

   Hence there resulted a division of the membership of the brotherhood into two classes, the practical and theoretic, or, as they are more commonly called, the operative and speculative, or “domatic” and “geomatic."

   2012, The Etiquette of Freemasonry: A Handbook for the Brethren, →ISBN

2. countableuncountableThe body of members of an organization.

   The memberships of the state chapters elect delegates to the national convention.

3. countableuncountablemathematicsThe fact of being a member of a set.

present singular third person memberships · participle present membershipping · participle past membershipped · past membershipped

1. transitivehuman sciencesTo classify (someone) as belonging to a certain group or community.

   1 more example

   Whatever the topic of the conversation the speaker must ‘membership’ his listener, put him into one of two or more mutually exclusive boxes. Each time a topic changes the listener must be re-membershipped, and during a conversation the same person may be membershipped as a doctor, a rugby player, a liberal, a gardener, a bridge player.

   1975 April, Malcolm Coulthard, “Discourse Analysis in English – A Short Review of the Literature”, in Language Teaching, volume 8, number 2, →DOI, page 83