adaptation
Pluraladaptations
- 1A change that something is given or goes through so it fits a particular condition or environment.
Like adjusting the sails of a boat to suit the wind.
The team made several adaptations to the design after testing it in cold weather.
Switching to night shifts required a major adaptation in her daily routine.
Similarmodification, adjustment, alteration, change
Note
Here the noun turns countable: a single change you can count and multiply, as in "adaptations to your schedule." The same split runs through the whole word. The mass noun names the process, and the count noun names its result, in biology (the evolved trait) as much as in the arts (the finished film or play). Like the process, the single change takes to for the condition it answers.
- 2The process of adjusting or modifying something, or of becoming suited to a new situation.
Like an immigrant gradually learning the customs of a new home.
Adaptation to remote work proved harder for some employees than for others.
Successful adaptation to the new software required weeks of training.
Similaradjustment, acclimatization
Note
The general sense the specialized ones branch from. It came through French and Medieval Latin adaptātiō from Latin adaptō, "I fit, adjust," and is built as adapt plus -ation. As a mass noun it names the adjusting itself, and it often takes two prepositions: of for what is adjusted, to for what it must fit, as in H. P. White's 1950 "adaptation of the rack-and-pinion system to a main line."
- 3A creative work based on a story or text that originally appeared in a different medium.
Like translating a poem into music: the same story carried in a new form.
The stage adaptation drew crowds who had never read the original trilogy.
Critics praised the film as a faithful adaptation of the Russian classic.
Similarversion
Note
Here the word names the finished product rather than the work of making it, so it takes a plural: one novel can yield several adaptations. The medium usually rides in front as a modifier (stage, film, television, theatrical), and the original follows with of, as when Frederick Lawton's Balzac (1910) surveys theatrical adaptations of the novelist's books. For the craft itself, see the process of adapting.
- 4The process of reworking an artistic work so it can be presented in a different medium.
Like rearranging a song so it can be played by an orchestra instead of a single guitar.
Adaptation for the screen demands choices about what to keep and what to drop.
The novel's adaptation into a miniseries took two years of careful work.
Note
The activity rather than the product. Adaptation studies keep this sense apart from the finished work it yields. The new medium usually follows to, as when David K. Irving calls plays "rich and suitable sources for adaptation to film." The original goes after of or from, so a novel undergoes adaptation from print to the screen.
- 5An instance of an organism undergoing change, or the structure or behavior that results from it.
Like a key shaped to fit one particular lock: the trait fits the environment that produced it.
The cactus's water-storing stem is a classic adaptation to arid conditions.
Many deep-sea fish have adaptations that let them survive crushing pressure.
Oppositemaladaptation
Note
Biologists count adaptations as traits. Each is a heritable structure, physiology or behavior that spread through natural selection because it raised fitness in a particular setting. The condition it answers follows to, a habit as old as Robert Sears's Guide to Knowledge (1844). There the eye's structure is "an adaptation to the laws of light."
- 6The process by which an organism changes over time to become better suited to its environment.
Like a river slowly carving a canyon: small changes adding up over vast stretches of time.
Adaptation allowed cave-dwelling species to lose their eyesight over many generations.
The finches of the Galápagos are a famous example of adaptation in action.
Oppositemaladaptation
Note
A biologist's process noun, and a strict one. Populations rather than individuals become adapted, across generations, as carriers of favorable heritable variation survive and reproduce more. The 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica treats acclimatization as one form of it: plants and animals gradually made able to flourish far from their original habitats. Its opposite is maladaptation, a poor fit between organism and surroundings.
- 7The adjustments social groups make to suit different social conditions and physical surroundings.
Like a community building seawalls and shifting its harvest times to survive a changing coastline.
Cultural adaptation enabled nomadic herders to thrive in the high mountains.
Adaptation to coastal life shaped the tools and customs of fishing communities.
Similaradjustment
Note
Sociology and anthropology use the word for collective strategies, whether technological, organizational or cultural. Through these, human groups meet the demands of their social and physical surroundings. Unlike the evolutionary process, nothing here needs to be inherited genetically: the change lives in tools, institutions and customs. The noun works both as a mass noun and as a count noun for a specific strategy.
Practice
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Origin
This word comes from French adaptation, which derives from Medieval Latin adaptātiō and ultimately from Latin adaptō ("I fit, adjust, or modify"). It is essentially "adapt" plus the ending "-ation".