integration
- 1The process of combining separate but compatible parts so that they form a unified whole.
Successful integration of the acquired company required aligning their processes with ours.
The integration of solar panels into the city grid lowered overall energy costs.
Similarincorporation, consolidation, combination, amalgamation
Oppositeseparation, fragmentation
- 2The process by which individuals or minority groups become accepted, participating members of a wider community.
The city invested heavily in the integration of recent arrivals into local life.
Language classes are central to the integration of newcomers into the workforce.
Similarassimilation, inclusion, incorporation
Oppositesegregation, exclusion, marginalization
Note
Here the word turns social, and it usually takes into: integration into the city, into the workforce, into local life. It is often set against assimilation. Integration means taking full part in a community while keeping a distinct identity; assimilation means adopting the majority culture wholesale. The narrower American use for ending segregation is the racial sense.
- 3Short form of racial integration.
The Supreme Court's rulings accelerated integration across the South.
Federal troops were sent to enforce integration at the university.
Note
An ellipsis: in American usage the bare noun stands for racial integration, the countering of segregation, and context supplies the missing adjective. Its natural opposite is segregation, and its typical settings are schools, universities and courts. Outside a US civil-rights setting, write racial integration in full, or the bare word will read as the general social sense.
- 4The act or process of making something whole or complete by uniting its separate parts.
The integration of the disparate research findings produced a coherent theory.
Personal growth often depends on the integration of past experiences into a stable sense of self.
Similarunification, synthesis, consolidation, amalgamation, combination
Oppositefragmentation, separation, disintegration
Note
The root sense the others branch from. The word came into English from French intégration and Latin integratio, and English also builds it from integrate plus -ion. It can be counted as well as massed. Philosophical prose speaks of "higher integrations," meaning levels at which things are made whole, as in Hegel's Philosophy of Nature.
- 5The mathematical operation of finding the integral of a function, the reverse of differentiation.
Numerical integration approximates the area when no exact formula exists.
The engineer used integration to compute total distance from a velocity function.
Oppositedifferentiation
Note
In calculus the noun names the operation, and its verb is integrate: one integrates a function. Indefinite integration yields an antiderivative. Definite integration gives the signed area under a curve over an interval. The fundamental theorem of calculus ties both to differentiation, and numerical integration approximates the result when no exact formula exists.
- 6In evolutionary theory, the process by which varied parts are compacted into something relatively simple and permanent, thought to alternate with differentiation in shaping how species develop.
In Spencer's scheme, integration draws diverse elements together while differentiation pulls them apart.
The theory treats integration as the force that consolidates an organism's varied parts into a permanent whole.
Oppositedifferentiation
Note
A term from nineteenth-century evolutionary theory, above all Herbert Spencer's, and best read as historical. In this sense integration never travels alone. It is one half of a pair with differentiation: the consolidating force set against the diversifying one, each supposed to take its turn. Use it when describing that scheme rather than as a term of current biology.
Practice
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Origin
This word comes from French intégration, itself from Latin integratio. It can also be analyzed as 'integrate' plus the suffix '-ion'.