# native

Pronunciation: say "NAY-tiv" /ˈneɪtɪv/

## Noun

1. A person born in a particular place.
   - Simple: A person who was born in a certain place.
   - _Only a native of the city could navigate its tangled streets._
   - _A native of Chicago, he moved to Seattle after college but still follows his hometown teams._
6. A person who speaks a particular language as their first language.
   - Simple: Someone who grew up speaking a language as their first language.
   - _A native rarely thinks about the grammar rules a learner must memorize._
   - _After ten years in Madrid, his Spanish was so fluent that people often took him for a native._
7. A plant or animal that occurs naturally in an area, as opposed to one that people introduced there.
   - Simple: A plant or animal that grows or lives in a place naturally and was not brought there by people.
   - _The red maple is a native of eastern North America and does well in wet soil._
   - _Homeowners who replace their lawns with natives often see more butterflies and songbirds._

## Adjective

2. Of a plant or animal, living or growing naturally in a particular place, rather than having been brought there by people from elsewhere.
   - Simple: Living or growing naturally in a place, not brought there from another country or region.
   - _The restaurant prides itself on serving only native shellfish._
   - _Wildflowers native to the prairie need far less water than the grass in most lawns._
3. Characteristic of or relating to the people who have inhabited a region since prehistoric times.
   - Simple: Having to do with the people who have lived in a place since very ancient times.
   - _The exhibit traces native craft traditions across the continent._
   - _Archaeologists uncovered native dwellings dating back millennia._
4. Belonging to a person by birth, such as the country where they were born or the language they learned first.
   - Simple: Belonging to you from the time you were born.
   - _He never lost the accent of his native region._
   - _Her native tongue was Portuguese, though she spoke five languages._
5. Belonging to or designed for the particular system or architecture in question.
   - Simple: Made to work directly on a certain computer or system, not through extra software.
   - _The developers rewrote the tool to run as native code on the new chips._
   - _Native applications generally perform faster than those run through emulation._
8. Original; in its natural, unaltered state, or making up the original substance of something.
   - Simple: Being the first or original form of something.
   - _The enzyme works only in its native state; once heat unfolds it, it can no longer do its job._
   - _To study how the protein really behaves, the team kept the cells cold so it would stay in its native form._
10. Arising from birth; belonging to a person's inborn nature.
   - Simple: Belonging to someone naturally from birth, not learned.
   - _The actor's native charm won over the audience instantly._
   - _She brought a native curiosity to every subject she studied._
11. Of an element or mineral, found naturally in a pure state rather than combined in a compound.
   - Simple: Found in nature in pure form, not joined with other substances.
   - _Prospectors occasionally discover native silver in the region's old mines._
   - _Native sulfur forms around the vents of active volcanoes._
12. Naturally related or closely connected to something else.
   - Simple: Naturally linked or connected to something else.
   - _A love of storytelling appears native to every human culture._
   - _The melancholy native to the poet's work pervades each stanza._

## Noun

9. A person of aboriginal descent, as distinguished from settlers, colonizers, or their descendants. *(dated)*
   - Simple: A person whose ancestors were the first people of a place, not settlers from elsewhere.
   - _Colonial records often described the natives in dismissive terms._
   - _In the old colonial records, every native was listed apart from the settlers, a practice many Indigenous people now find insulting._

## Other meanings

- (noun) An oyster of the species Ostrea edulis, the European flat oyster.

## Origin

Latin nātus ("born") gave nātīvus, which passed into Old French as natif and from there into Middle English natif, the form English inherited. Naive and neif are doublets of it.

Source: DictionaryAI, https://dictionaryai.com/define/native (written from Wiktionary data, CC BY-SA 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).