assimilation

Meanings

1. 1
   noun

   The act of assimilating or the state of being assimilated.

   --France swarms with Gracchus's and Publicolas, who by imaginary assimilations of acts, which a change of manners has rendered different, fancy themselves more than equal to their prototypes.

2. 2
   noun

   The metabolic conversion of nutrients into tissue.

   We have great need to be careful in these assimilations; some kinds of food are rich but not easily digested.

3. 3
   noun

   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.

   Hence, rather than being the result of mishearing and assimilation, the application of Hobson-Jobson to the Muharram was intentionally disparaging.

4. 4
   noun

   The adoption, by a minority group, of the customs and attitudes of the dominant culture.

   After centuries of British cultural assimilation, a majority of Irish now speak English instead of Irish.

5. 5
   noun

   in the theories of Jean Piaget: the application of a general schema to a particular instance

6. 6
   noun

   the process of assimilating new ideas into an existing cognitive structure

7. 7
   noun

   a linguistic process by which a sound becomes similar to an adjacent sound

8. 8
   noun

   the process of absorbing nutrients into the body after digestion

Etymology

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