Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. The act or process of assimilating.
- n. The state of being assimilated.
- n. Physiology The conversion of nutriments into living tissue; constructive metabolism.
- n. Linguistics The process by which a sound is modified so that it becomes similar or identical to an adjacent or nearby sound. For example, the prefix in- becomes im- in impossible by assimilation to the labial p of possible.
- n. The process whereby a minority group gradually adopts the customs and attitudes of the prevailing culture.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. The act or process of assimilating or of being assimilated. Specifically— The act or process of making or becoming like or identical; the act or process of bringing into harmony: followed by to or with.
- n. In physiology, the act or process by which organisms convert and absorb nutriment, so that it becomes part of the fluid or solid substances composing them.
- n. In pathology, the supposed conversion, according to an obsolete theory, of the fluids of the body to the nature of any morbific matter.
- n. In philology, the act or process by which one alphabetic sound is rendered like, or less unlike, another neighboring sound; a lightening of the effort of utterance by lessening or removing the discordance of formation between different sounds in a word, or in contiguous words. The kinds and degrees of assimilation are very various, and include a large part of the historical changes in the phonetic form of words. Examples are assimilate from Latin ad-similare, correction from Latin conrectio, impend from L. in-pendere, Latin rectus from reg-tus, Latin rex(reks) from reg-s, English legs (pronounced legz), reaped (pronounced reapt), and so on.
- n. In physiology, the conversion of chyle into material suitable for appropriation by the tissues.
- n. In psychology: The process whereby new contents are received into a given consciousness: a general term covering the processes of fusion, association contrast, recognition, etc.
- n. In Wundt's terminology, a particular form of simultaneous association of ideas.
- n. In petrography, a term used to express the theory that molten magmas, when forced upward into the solid rocks, may, through fusion of included fragments or wall rock, absorb or assimilate a certain amount of these foreign materials, thus changing in some degree the chemical composition of the magma as a whole.
Wiktionary
- n. The act of assimilating or the state of being assimilated.
- n. The metabolic conversion of nutrients into tissue.
- n. by extension The absorption of new ideas into an existing cognitive structure.
- n. phonology 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.
- n. sociology (cultural studies) The adoption, by a minority group, of the customs and attitudes of the dominant culture.
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. The act or process of assimilating or bringing to a resemblance, likeness, or identity; also, the state of being so assimilated.
- n. (Physiol.) The conversion of nutriment into the fluid or solid substance of the body, by the processes of digestion and absorption, whether in plants or animals.
WordNet 3.0
- n. the process of assimilating new ideas into an existing cognitive structure
- n. the state of being assimilated; people of different backgrounds come to see themselves as part of a larger national family
- n. the process of absorbing nutrients into the body after digestion
- n. in the theories of Jean Piaget: the application of a general schema to a particular instance
- n. a linguistic process by which a sound becomes similar to an adjacent sound
- n. the social process of absorbing one cultural group into harmony with another
Examples
“In the social science literature on immigration and ethnicity, the term assimilation has been assigned various meanings.”
“When the term assimilation is used with reference to mental development, it is well to remember that, while it originally referred to the building up of anatomical elements, these elements, once constructed, have an immediate psychological bearing.”
“As mentioned above, the primary reaction in the assimilation is a fixation of carbon dioxide to an acceptor, the chemical nature of which has been established by Calvin.”
“Nathan Glazer’s review of Alien Nation was quite positive, even though it was titled What He Should Have Said but it includes this passage, which shows a surprising amount of faith in assimilation from the man who wrote Beyond The Melting Pot”
“The West has lost it's confidence in assimilation, of self-sufficiency, so immigrants learn to celebrate their indigenous culture (which was so wonderful they had to leave it), to demand various rights, and glom onto racial and ethnic hucksters who make a living off the guilt of European suburbanites.”
Immigration: Has the Public Been Ignored?, Bryan Caplan | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty
“If assimilation is one´s primary goal then one has one´s work cut out for one.”
“If you believe in assimilation and open borders, how is it much different than foreign concessions?”
Rosen and Responsibility, Bryan Caplan | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty
“Would Ray or anyone else here like to present any hard evidence that assimilation is not happening or is happening slower than it did in the past?”
Fine-tuning Immigration, Arnold Kling | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty
“An interesting aside related to assimilation is one of heterosis.”
Fine-tuning Immigration, Arnold Kling | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty
““In education, which best determines life chances in the United States, assimilation is interrupted by the second generation and stagnates thereafter.””
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘assimilation’.
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Interesting words
A list of words that are odd or words that I have looked up.
concupiscence, brize, scree, scoria, forestaff, spanaemia, valetudinarianism, distasture, pyrethrum, laudanum, gentian, bicameral and 11184 more...
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Twitter favorites
The new favourite words of people on Twitter.
A script searches Twitter for "X is my new favorite word" and adds it to this list.
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grabbable, retuiteando, leaving, fantastic, absolutely, kurwa, hella, ridic, underpass, hate, interlude, plush and 2369 more... -
The Sog Collection
My big word list.
chaos, flaccid, empirical, flotsam, cacophony, grumble, assuage, awe, romance, mortality, coalesce, fortuitous and 3282 more...
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Aequoria's list
affect, deleterious, nuance, pliant, verbatim, pertinent, latter, municipality, provincial, voyeuristic, circumlocution, wane and 798 more...
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dienekes's Words
chutzpah, lexicon, intrepid, pedagogical, schlemiel, schism, erudite, anathema, pugilist, jaunty, paradigm, automaton and 949 more...
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Tory's First Wordie List
perambulate, mumpsimus, euphoric, peripatetic, mellifluous, soporific, neologism, nihilism, nepotism, effervescent, lascivious, esoteric and 217 more...
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Things I adore
words, linguistics, etymology, philosophy, literature, research, poetry, science, cognition, solitude, nihilism, zen and 139 more...
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arnon's Words
treatise, enthrall, nimble, hinder, serene, transhumanism, meliorism, denote, apropos, equivalence, valence, orthogonal and 156 more...
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linguistics
words associated with language and linguistics
subjunctive, grammar, accent, adjective, adverb, bilingual, case, conjugation, consonant, creole, dialect, diphthong and 33 more...
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Words About Words
tmesis, asyndeton, polysyndeton, polyptoton, assimilation, metathesis, epenthesis, dissimilation, anastrophe, periphrasis, zeugma, synecdoche and 12 more...
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OrbitalCombustion's Words
nepenthe, phrontistery, peregrination, pervicacious, sinistrality, phallogocentric, prolixity, leptokurtic, ineffable, haecceity, lucubration, vicissitudes and 1026 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for assimilation.

dailyword The Borg do this to other races in "Star Trek." Nov 1, 2012