Here it goes:
Blogger Danielle Herzog related her anguish upon hearing about the “mean girls” in her daughter’s kindergarten class.
It is from Psychology Today. I am aware that relate has quite a few meanings, but cannot get which one fits there.
asked May 19, 2018 at 5:53
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3relate: "4. verb If you relate a story, you tell it." Basically told a story about her anguish.– user3169Commented May 19, 2018 at 6:05
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-1. The very first definition in M-W is "to give an account of; tell". merriam-webster.com/dictionary/relate It is clearly a transitive verb here (related her anguish) so the choices were actually quite few. The second meaning, "to draw a connection between", requires a prepositional phrase complement, ...related A to B.– TimRCommented May 19, 2018 at 12:00
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2 Answers
As you said, "relate" has a few meanings. In this case, the meaning of "relate", according to Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English 5th edition, is:
to tell someone about events that have happened to you or to someone else
So, in this example, Blogger Danielle Herzog simple told someone about her anguish ...
According to Concise Oxford Thesaurus, synonyms of "relate", in this case, include:
tell, recount, narrate, report, recite
In this case, it can be replaced by "described". Running a google search for "she described her anguish" gets around 2000 hits, which gives us an idea of its frequency of use. In a similar search for "she related her anguish", I found only two results. This suggests to me that this particular use of "relate" is lower frequency, i.e. less commonly used in general, than in its "linking" sense.
