Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Naturalize \Nat"u*ral*ize\ (?; 135), v. t. [imp. & p. p. Naturalized; p. pr. & vb. n. Naturalizing.] [Cf. F. naturaliser. See Natural.]
To make natural; as, custom naturalizes labor or study.
To confer the rights and privileges of a native subject or citizen on; to make as if native; to adopt, as a foreigner into a nation or state, and place in the condition of a native subject.
To receive or adopt as native, natural, or vernacular; to make one's own; as, to naturalize foreign words.
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To adapt; to accustom; to habituate; to acclimate; to cause to grow as under natural conditions.
Its wearer suggested that pears and peaches might yet be naturalized in the New England climate.
--Hawthorne.
Naturalize \Nat"u*ral*ize\, v. i.
To become as if native.
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To explain phenomena by natural agencies or laws, to the exclusion of the supernatural.
Infected by this naturalizing tendency.
--H. Bushnell.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
"admit (an alien) to rights of a citizen," 1550s (implied in naturalized), from natural (adj.) in its etymological sense of "by birth" + -ize; in some instances from Middle French naturaliser, from natural. Of things, from 1620s; of plants or animals, from 1796. Related: Naturalizing.
Wiktionary
vb. 1 To grant citizenship to someone not born a citizen 2 To acclimatize an animal or plant 3 To make natural 4 To limit explanations of a phenomenon to naturalistic ones and exclude supernatural ones 5 (context linguistics English) To make (a word) a natural part of the language.
WordNet
v. make into a citizen; "The French family was naturalized last year" [syn: naturalise] [ant: denaturalize]
explain with reference to nature
adopt to another place; "The stories had become naturalized into an American setting" [syn: naturalise]
make more natural or lifelike [syn: naturalise] [ant: denaturalize]
adapt (a wild plant or unclaimed land) to the environment; "domesticate oats"; "tame the soil" [syn: domesticate, cultivate, naturalise, tame]
Usage examples of "naturalize".
Widow--and to tell the truth, she was not far out of the way, and with Helen Darley as a foil anybody would know she must be foudroyant and pyramidal,--if these French adjectives may be naturalized for this one particular exigency.
New Texas, Andrew Jackson Hickock resigned, married a daughter of a local rancher and became a naturalized citizen of that planet.
California statute prohibiting the issuance of fishing licenses to persons ineligible to citizenship is disallowed, both on the basis of Amendment XIV and on the ground that the statute invaded a field of power reserved to the National Government, namely, the determination of the conditions on which aliens may be admitted, naturalized, and permitted to reside in the United States.
But this session was chiefly distinguished by an act for naturalizing Jews, and a bill for the better preventing clandestine marriages.
Alphonse Winterton, but one Alphonse Spenser had become a naturalized Canadian citizen as of October, 1974, and had at that time listed his residence as Squamish, British Columbia.
The only qualification for the elective franchise the American system can logically insist on is that the elector belong to the territorial people--that is, be a natural-born or a naturalized citizen, be a major in full possession of his natural faculties, and unconvicted of any infamous offence.
He had become a naturalized Englishman, but he never carried his anglophilia to the point of being puritan, or even respectable.
But power to naturalize aliens may be, and early was, devolved by Congress upon state courts having a common law jurisdiction.
So if you like to go ashore this evening with Square you could have a couple of days naturalizing along your river: there is a little Kroo village where you could pass the night.
He was a naturalized American citizen and was serving his second term for using the mails to promote a Ponzi scheme.
But the story-teller, in every case, has so recolored and reshaped his borrowing as to naturalize it.
Spirit and Hope were foreign-born, technically, as they had come from the independent satellite of Callisto and had been naturalized as full Jupiter citizens when they left the Navy.
General government has itself no power to naturalize a single foreigner, or in any case to say who shall or who shall not be citizens, either of a State or of the United States, or to declare who may or may not be electors even of its own officers.
From the extraordinary manner in which European productions have recently spread over New Zealand, and have seized on places which must have been previously occupied, we may believe, if all the animals and plants of Great Britain were set free in New Zealand, that in the course of time a multitude of British forms would become thoroughly naturalized there, and would exterminate many of the natives.
It seems to be a natural anglicization that started soon after the 'Indian Cress' was naturalized (from Peru, I think) in the 18th century.