RETENTION

n. act of keeping possession; maintenance, act of holding; memory, capacity to remember

Retention can have the following meanings:Instance retaining (e.g. water in the ground; see retention pond or retention basin)In learning: the ability to retain facts and figures in memory (spaced repetition)In schools, keeping a student in the same grade for another year (that is, not promoting the student to the next higher grade with his/her classmates) (see Grade retention and Social promotion)In marketing & sales terminology : Sales retention is the department or the action needed to retain the current customers, subscribers.On Usenet, the retention period is the time a news server holds a newsgroup posting before deleting it as no longer relevant. For practical reasons, most news servers have different categories for different classes of postings: for example, the "announce" newsgroup for the ISP or other agency providing the news server may retain postings either for a very long time or indefinitely, whereas postings in binary newsgroups are usually not retained for long due to the storage requirements involved.In the United States court system, judicial retention is a process whereby a judge is periodically subject to a vote in order to remain in the position of judge.In organizations, keeping personnel within the organization from departing.
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Retention /re·ten·tion/ the process of holding back or keeping in position, as persistence in the body of material normally excreted, or maintenance [more]Retention - Community and Resources

Noun
1. the act of keeping in your possession
(synonym) keeping, holding
(hypernym) possession, ownership
(hyponym) withholding
(derivation) retain, hold, keep back, hold back
2. the power of retaining and recalling past experience; "he had a good memory when he was younger"
(synonym) memory, retentiveness
(hypernym) faculty, mental faculty, module
(hyponym) remembrance, recollection, anamnesis
(derivation) retain
3. the power of retaining liquid; "moisture retentivity of soil"
(synonym) retentiveness, retentivity
(hypernym) impermeability, impermeableness
(hyponym) urinary retention

n. retention