assimilation

noun5

1. •
   The act of assimilating or the state of being assimilated.

   • --France swarms with Gracchus's and Publicolas, who by imaginary assimilations of acts, which a change of manners has rendered different, fancy themselves more than equal to their prototypes. — 1797
2. •
   The metabolic conversion of nutrients into tissue.

   • We have great need to be careful in these assimilations; some kinds of food are rich but not easily digested. — 1908
3. •
   The absorption of new ideas into an existing cognitive structure.
4. •
   A sound change process by which the phonetics of a speech segment becomes more like that of another segment in a word (or at a word boundary), so that a change of phoneme occurs.

   • Hence, rather than being the result of mishearing and assimilation, the application of Hobson-Jobson to the Muharram was intentionally disparaging. — 2014
5. •
   The adoption, by a minority group, of the customs and attitudes of the dominant culture.

   • After centuries of British cultural assimilation, a majority of Irish now speak English instead of Irish.