colonization

American  

[kahl-uhn-iz-ay-shuhn, -ahyz-] / ˌkɑl ən ɪzˈeɪ ʃən, -aɪz- /

noun

• colonizations
  plural

1. the act, on the part of a nation or government, of claiming and forcibly taking control of territory other than its own, usually sending or allowing its own people to settle there.

2. the act of compelling or inducing people to settle in a particular area for economic or political purposes.

3. Biology. the spreading of a species into a new habitat.

4. Microbiology. the multiplication of a microbe in or on another organism, usually without causing infection or disease.

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colonization Scientific  

/ kŏl′ə-nĭ-zā′shən /

1. The spreading of a species into a new habitat. For example, flying insects and birds are often the first animal species to initiate colonization of barren islands formed by vulcanism or falling water levels. The first plant species to colonize such islands are often transported there as airborne seeds or through the droppings of birds.

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Other Word Forms

Derived Forms

• co-colonization
  noun
• colonizationist
  noun
• decolonization
  noun
• neo-colonization
  noun
• non-colonization
  noun
• recolonization
  noun
• self-colonization
  noun
• semi-colonization
  noun
• anti-colonization
  adjective
• post-colonization
  adjective
• pre-colonization
  adjective
• pro-colonization
  adjective

Inflected Forms

Nouns

• colonizations
  plural

Explanation

Colonization is the act of setting up a colony away from one's place of origin. Remember when the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock? That was the beginning of a period of colonization. You may have heard of an ant colony, which is a community of ants that decided to set up shop in a particular place; this is an example of ant colonization. With humans, colonization is sometimes seen as a negative act because it tends to involve an invading culture establishing political control over an indigenous population (the people living there before the arrival of the settlers).

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

colonization colonizations

By using only part of the original painting and omitting the mission, I’m reclaiming space for Black and brown spirituality while acknowledging that this land existed long before colonization.

From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 5, 2026

The company's Starship rocket -- whose latest iteration could launch Thursday -- is explicitly designed with Mars colonization in mind.

From Barron's ● May 21, 2026

A good share are actively planning for Mars colonization.

From Slate ● May 8, 2026

"Not only were oysters harvested for food from the earliest days of colonization, but the reefs themselves were dredged and the shells crushed and burned to make lime for cement and mortar," she says.

From Science Daily ● Apr. 6, 2026

As a result, ships built and manned in Spain itself were able to sail to the West Indies; there was nothing equivalent to the Greenland bottleneck that had throttled Norse colonization.

From "Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies" by Jared M. Diamond

Yet the people of Vanuatu, having experienced repeated upheavals and colonizations, might have glimpsed in that very paradox an expanded sense of possibility.

From New York Times ● Dec. 8, 2021

Science fiction as a genre has long been obsessed with the possibility of reaching Mars, for both expeditions, such as Andy Weir’s novel The Martian, and colonizations, like in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy.

From The Verge ● Mar. 25, 2018

“What is clear is that the island has a complex settlement history involving multiple colonizations by different populations at different times,” Crowther says.

From Science Magazine ● May 30, 2016

But considering an island on the other side of the world — Britain — with its discontinuous record of human settlement over 900,000 years, I can also imagine episodic human colonizations on Flores.

From Nature ● Oct. 21, 2014

That is, everything about the Clovis phenomenon and its spread through the Americas corresponds to findings for other, unquestioned virgin-land colonizations in history.

From "Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies" by Jared M. Diamond