naturalize

Verb

• make into a citizen
  • "The French family was naturalized last year"
• explain with reference to nature
• adopt to another place
  • "The stories had become naturalized into an American setting"
• make more natural or lifelike
• adapt (a wild plant or unclaimed land) to the environment
• To grant citizenship to someone not born a citizen.
• To acclimatize an animal or plant.
• To make natural.
• To limit explanations of a phenomenon to naturalistic ones and exclude supernatural ones.
• To make (a word) a natural part of the language, using the native homologue of each phoneme (and often for each morpheme) of the imported word (e.g., native inflections).
• To study nature.

Examples

• Custom naturalizes labour or study.
• English orthography often (but not invariably) drops the diacritics from words that it has naturalized from other languages.
• English speakers have naturalized the French word "café".
• In English, foreign words are typically written in italics until they are naturalized.

Synonyms

cultivate, domesticate, naturalise, tame, paronymize

Antonyms

denaturalize, exile, expatriate, other, supernaturalize

Related Words

approximation, hyperforeignism, loanword, unadapted borrowing