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indigenous

UK/ɪnˈdɪdʒɪnəs/US/ɪnˈdɪd͡ʒənəs/
adjectiveC1Common in everyday speech and writing · #7,923 of 15,258mostly written

Indigenous means native to a place from the earliest times. Indigenous plants, Indigenous peoples, indigenous to Australia.

Of plants and animals it is a plain scientific term, the opposite of introduced. Of people it names those who were there before colonisation, and it is capitalised in that use in Canada, Australia and increasingly elsewhere, as a mark of respect.

Definitions of indigenous

  1. 1adjectiveindigenousNative to a place from the earliest times.C1

    “The kangaroo is indigenous to Australia.”

indigenous is a quality.

Where it comes from

Latin indigena means born in a place — indu, within, plus the root of gignere, to beget.

  1. Proto-Indo-European

    *ǵenh₁-

  2. Latin

    indigenus — native, born in a country

  3. English, today

    indigenous

Built from

  • in · Latin — in
  • gignō · Latin — give birth to

Latin indigenus (“native, born in a country”), from indi- (indu-), an old derivative of in (“in”), gen- the root of gignō (“give birth to”), and English -ous. Compare indigene, Ancient Greek ἐνδογενής (“born in the house”), and the separately formed piecewise doublet endogenous. Unrelated to Indian.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

indigenous in the wild

  • The bulk of contemporary Taiwanese indigenous peoples mostly reside both in their traditional mountain villages as well as increasingly in Taiwan's urban areas.

    Taiwanese indigenous peoples

  • The indigenous languages of the Americas are the languages that were used by the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, before the arrival of Europeans.

    Indigenous languages of the Americas

  • In the United States, 372,000 people reported speaking an indigenous language at home in the 2010 census.

    Indigenous languages of the Americas

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

the gignō family

genius

indigenous — used about once every 2,971 pages · #7,923 · point at the bar for the others