noun

• The act of assimilating or the state of being assimilated.
• The metabolic conversion of nutrients into tissue.
• (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.