acquired
Americanadjective
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obtained or procured, such as by purchasing, receiving, learning.
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Medicine/Medical. (of a disease or condition) developed by the patient at some point after birth.
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Biology. (of a trait) developed by an organism in response to its environment; not inherited.
Other Word Forms
Explanation
The adjective acquired describes something you're not born with: you gain or develop it later in life, like your acquired taste for coffee. Acquired comes from the Latin word acquirere, meaning "to seek in addition to. Something acquired is something you have gotten, not something you always had. For example, you may have acquired the habit of buying lots...and lots of sneakers after getting a job in a shoe store. Or, if you have an acquired habit of reading novels, this is something that developed over time. After all, you weren't born reading!
Vocabulary lists containing acquired
"To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee, Chapters 12–15
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Evolutionary Biology - Adaptation
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STAAR Biology: Biological Evolution and Classification
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
For a long time it wasn’t clear whether Kidd was an advocate of the deal in which Dallas acquired oft-injured center Anthony Davis or a victim of a front-office blunder.
From Los Angeles Times • May 20, 2026
His venture followed the sale of his dot-com business Zip2, after which he founded the online payments company that merged into the entity that would become PayPal, which eBay later acquired.
From Barron's • May 20, 2026
Anthropic will pay $15bn a year to access data centres in the American South for Musk's xAI which was recently acquired by SpaceX.
From BBC • May 20, 2026
One was a system designed for inference—the computing required to run AI models—that makes use of a chip designed by startup Groq, whose technology and top talent Nvidia acquired in December for $20 billion.
From The Wall Street Journal • May 20, 2026
“It’s not terrible, it’s an acquired taste,” Gibby said.
From "The First State of Being" by Erin Entrada Kelly
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
