The Collaborative International Dictionary
Domesticate \Do*mes"ti*cate\, v. t. [imp. & p. p. Domesticated; p. pr. & vb. n. Domesticating.] [LL. domesticatus, p. p. of domesticare to reside in, to tame. See Domestic, a.]
To make domestic; to habituate to home life; as, to domesticate one's self.
To cause to be, as it were, of one's family or country; as, to domesticate a foreign custom or word.
To tame or reclaim from a wild state; as, to domesticate wild animals; to domesticate a plant.
Wiktionary
vb. (present participle of domesticate English)
Usage examples of "domesticating".
Since those areas of nonindependent origins were suitable for prehistoric food production as soon as domesticates had arrived, why did the peoples of those areas not become farmers and herders without outside assistance, by domesticating local plants and animals?
It was only within the last 11,000 years that some peoples turned to what is termed food production: that is, domesticating wild animals and plants and eating the resulting livestock and crops.
In a few places it developed independently, as a result of local people domesticating local plants and animals.
For example, Indians of the eastern United States were domesticating local plants by about 2500 B.
Neither did thrushes set out with the intent of domesticating strawberries.
But there is a fatal flaw in this reasoning: plant domestication is not a matter of hunter-gatherers' domesticating a single plant and otherwise carrying on unchanged with their nomadic lifestyle.
Unpredictably aggressive behavior on the part of a large and potentially dangerous mammal is also part of the reason why the initially so promising modern experiments in domesticating elk and eland have not been more successful.
That rapid spread preempted opportunities for domesticating those and related species in the Balkans.
Finally, speakers of ancestral Afroasiatic languages may have been involved in domesticating the crops native to Ethiopia, and they certainly introduced Fertile Crescent crops to North Africa.
Putting together direct archaeological evidence of crops with the more indirect linguistic evidence, we deduce that the people who were domesticating sorghum and millet in the Sahara thousands of years ago spoke languages ancestral to modern Nilo-Saharan languages.
But there is a fatal flaw in this reasoning: plant domestication is not a matter of hunter-gatherers’ domesticating a single plant and otherwise carrying on unchanged with their nomadic lifestyle.
How did you love something wild without either domesticating it, or being eaten by it?
The first job of the Initial colony was to farm the land, experimenting with both Terran and indigenous grains, adapting Terran livestock to Doona and, if possible, domesticating the herd, animals which roamed Doona's pasturelands.
The area around Honshu hasn't been much bothered by the felines but the new holds nearby have been rounding up and domesticating more and more wild stock.