Definitions

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

  • adjective Biology Not specifically adapted to a particular environment or function; not specialized.
  • adjective Generally prevalent.
  • adjective Involving an entire organ.
  • adjective Spreading through or affecting the entire body; not localized.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • Specifically, in biology, common or primitive, as a structure or organism; representing or held to represent a broad or general type of form; synthetic; undifferentiated: the opposite of specialized: as, a lucernarian is or represents a generalized type of hydrozoans; some fossil mammals had a generalized dental formula.

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

  • adjective (Zoöl.) Comprising structural characters which are separated in more specialized forms; synthetic.

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

  • adjective Made more general, less specialized.
  • verb Simple past tense and past participle of generalize.

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

  • adjective not biologically differentiated or adapted to a specific function or environment

Etymologies

Sorry, no etymologies found.

Support

Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word generalized.

Examples

Comments

Log in or sign up to get involved in the conversation. It's quick and easy.