assimilation
/əsɪmɪˈleɪʃ(ə)n
/noun [mass noun]
1The process of taking in and fully understanding information or ideas: the assimilation of the knowledge of the Greeks...
- Despite his early assimilation of modernist methods, he has long been underappreciated.
- The system is designed to enable the rapid and/or accurate assimilation of complex information in the undersea battle space.
- The earlier that students are introduced to the software development process, the smoother the assimilation of this body of knowledge will be.
1.1The absorption and integration of people, ideas, or culture into a wider society or culture: the assimilation of Italians into American society...
- Similarly, Jones defies an easy assimilation into civilian society.
- There is nothing new about the assimilation of elements of popular culture into the fine arts.
- Assimilation was a process of monitoring non-indigenous lives using non-indigenous benchmarks.
2The absorption and digestion of food or nutrients by the body or any biological system: nitrate assimilation usually takes place in leaves...
- Bee pollen is used to improve digestive assimilation as well as athletic performance.
- This results in a smaller stimulation of photosynthetic assimilation at elevated levels of carbon dioxide.
- This corresponds to the optimal distribution of leaf nitrogen that maximizes carbon assimilation and crop productivity.
3The process of becoming similar to something: Watson was ready to work for the assimilation of Scots law to English law where he thought it was justified...
- What was happening here was assimilation to the English model with its directly state-run Anglican Church.
- As Aristotle states, knowledge is an assimilation to the thing known.
- We often see the assimilation of differing perspectives.
3.1 Phonetics The fact of a sound being made more like another in the same or next word: when p is preceded by some Latin prefixes, it is doubled because of the assimilation of a consonant, as in ‘apparent’ (ad-parent) [count noun]: there are many assimilations and elisions of consonants and vowels...
- In order to comprehend the mechanisms of assimilation, some comprehension of the production of speech sounds is needed.
- The vowel that causes the vowel assimilation is frequently termed the trigger.
- This may help reduce final consonant deletion, assimilation, and other phonological processes.