Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • adjective Relating to or exhibiting adaptation.
  • adjective Readily capable of adapting or of being adapted.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • Of, pertaining to, or characterized by adaptation; making or made fit or suitable; susceptible of or undergoing accordant change.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • adjective Suited, given, or tending, to adaptation; characterized by adaptation; capable of adapting.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • adjective Of, pertaining to, characterized by or showing adaptation; making or made fit or suitable.
  • adjective Capable of being adapted or of adapting; susceptible of or undergoing accordant change.
  • adjective psychology Of a trait: that helps an individual to function well in society.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • adjective having a capacity for adaptation

Etymologies

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Examples

  • Ruan's model, however, which she calls adaptive, aims to accurately localize tumors in real-time by imaging smarter, rather than more frequently.

    RedOrbit News - Technology 2010

  • While modernizing the three-story building, the Meekers plan to also retain its historic flavor, which they call adaptive reuse.

    News from www.muscatinejournal.com 2009

  • In some sense, planning to be flexible and adaptive is the most difficult type of planning that can be done.

    Doubts about Planning, Arnold Kling | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty 2009

  • But where is the direct supportive evidence for the assumption that complexity is rooted in adaptive processes?

    A Disclaimer for Behe? 2009

  • Delbanco identifies a quality he calls "adaptive energy" in the old artists who continue to work, undaunted, to the last possible moment.

    Nicholas Delbanco's "Lastingness: the Art of Old Age" 2011

  • For this purpose, control and regulating technology had to be further developed into self-regulating biomechatronic systems, which could also play a future role in adaptive production.

    The Future of Bionics Inspired by Nature | Impact Lab 2010

  • Whether there is telic agency involved in adaptive evolution or just ruthless selection (not in evidence in many cases, all the way down to the genes themselves), there are reasons why birds have wings and mammals have hair and whales have subcutaneous fat … these things have function for the organism – they work.

    Crossroads 2009

  • Start with a replicating system having built-in adaptive mechanisms and guess what happens next?

    A Disclaimer for Behe? 2009

  • It writes: "The idea of the big society is at its weakest when it is presented as a partisan technical solution to acute socio-economic problems, and at its strongest when viewed as a non-partisan long-term adaptive challenge to enrich our social and human capital."

    Before we build Cameron's big society, we'll need to know what it is 2011

  • Start with a replicating system having built-in adaptive mechanisms and guess what happens next?

    A Disclaimer for Behe? 2009

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