Showing results for "adopted"

• past tense form of adopt.
• past participle of adopt.

adopted

British  

/ əˈdɒptɪd /

adjective

1. having been adopted Compare adoptive

   an adopted child

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Explanation

Something that's adopted has been deliberately chosen. Your adopted country is the place where you choose to live, not necessarily the one in which you're born. If you describe yourself as adopted, it means that you were taken in and raised by parents who didn't give birth to you. Just as your adoptive parents chose you to be their child, other adopted things are also chosen: an adopted language is one you learn and then choose to speak, and an adopted state is the place you freely decide to live in. The Latin root is adoptare, "choose for oneself."

Example Sentences

Constitution, adopted in 1787 but not finally ratified until the summer of 1788, is by far the oldest national constitution in the world.

From The Wall Street Journal • Jul. 3, 2026

Author and broadcaster PJ Harrison, who last year released the biography Gallagher: The Rise and Fall of Oasis, finds the process of pop songs being adopted by football fans fascinating.

From BBC • Jul. 2, 2026

It cited research on algorithmic pricing that found when a station adopted this kind of software, prices rose by an average of 6 cents a gallon.

From Los Angeles Times • Jul. 1, 2026

His blunder is captured in the false proposition that birthright citizenship “crossed the Atlantic with the colonists—and was adopted with little fanfare after the Revolution” as an outgrowth of the common law of England.

From The Wall Street Journal • Jul. 1, 2026

When the Arabs adopted Hindu-Arabic numerals, they also adopted zero.

From "Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea" by Charles Seife

Related Words

• accessible
• familiar
• prevalent
• public
• rampant
• ubiquitous
• universal