Definition of "naturalize" in Englisch

verb

1. (transitive) To grant citizenship to someone not born a citizen.

2. (transitive) To acclimatize an animal or plant.

3. To make natural.

   • Custom naturalizes labour or study.

4. (transitive) To limit explanations of a phenomenon to naturalistic ones and exclude supernatural ones.

5. (linguistics, transitive) 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).

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

6. (transitive, intransitive) To study nature.