noun

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

2. The metabolic conversion of nutrients into tissue.

3. (by extension) 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.

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