English Explanatory Dictionary

assimilation

English dictionary entry

Meanings

noun
  1. The act of assimilating or the state of being assimilated.
  2. The metabolic conversion of nutrients into tissue.
  3. The absorption of new ideas into an existing cognitive structure.
  4. A sound change process by which the phonetics of a speech segment becomes more like that of another segment in a word (or at a word boundary), so that a change of phoneme occurs.
  5. The adoption, by a minority group, of the customs and attitudes of the dominant culture.

Pronunciation

/əˌsɪməˈleɪʃən/ LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-assimilation.wav

Word forms

assimilation assimilations

Etymology

Borrowed from Medieval Latin assimilatio. By surface analysis, assimilate + -ion.

Antonyms

dissimilation

Related words

acculturation liaison mutation rendaku sandhi

Derived words

regressive assimilation anticipatory assimilation progressive assimilation perseverative assimilation antiassimilation assimilational assimilationism assimilationist benevolent assimilation bioassimilation disassimilation language assimilation left-to-right assimilation malassimilation nonassimilation obliterative assimilation photoassimilation reassimilation right-to-left assimilation Yorkshire assimilation
This entry uses open data from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA/GFDL). Word forms are used for search and are not indexed as separate pages.
Back to search All on A Russian dictionary Dahl dictionary