Idiomatic means sounding natural to somebody who grew up with the language. Idiomatic English, an idiomatic translation, not quite idiomatic.
It is the hardest thing for a learner to reach and the easiest for a native speaker to judge, since a sentence can be perfectly correct and still not idiomatic. An idiomatic translation reads as if it were written in the target language.
1adjectiveidiomaticSounding natural to somebody who grew up with the language.
“Her English is correct but not always idiomatic, so she sometimes sounds a little formal.”
idiomatic is a quality.
Greek idiomatikos comes from idioma, a peculiarity of language.
Ancient Greek
ἰδιωματικός — related to an idiom
English, today
idiomatic
Built from
From Ancient Greek ἰδιωματικός (“related to an idiom”), from ἰδίωμα (“idiom”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA