Noun

(en noun)

The act of assimilating]] or the state of being [[assimilate, assimilated.

* {{quote-book, year=1797, author=An English Lady, title=A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795,, chapter=, edition= citation

, passage=--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.}}

* {{quote-news, year=1996, date=January 26, author=Bertha Husband, title=Double Identity, work=Chicago Reader citation

, passage=His work generally is full of assimilations and quotations from art that is not Mexican, and he's said, "Nationalism has nothing to do with my work.}}

The metabolic conversion of nutrients into tissue.

* {{quote-book, year=1908, author=Washington Gladden, title=The Church and Modern Life, chapter=, edition= citation

, passage=We have great need to be careful in these assimilations ; some kinds of food are rich but not easily digested.}}

(by extension) The absorption of new ideas into an existing cognitive structure.

(phonology) 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.

(sociology, cultural studies) The adoption, by a minority group, of the customs and attitudes of the dominant culture.

Noun

(en noun)

(analysis) A straight line which a curve approaches arbitrarily closely, as they go to infinity. The limit of the curve, its tangent "at infinity".

(by extension, figuratively) Anything which comes near to but never meets something else.

* 1860 : Frederic William Farrar, An Essay on the Origin of Language , page 117

Language, in relation to thought, must ever be regarded as an asymptote .