domesticate
Americanverb (used with object)
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to tame (an animal), especially by generations of breeding, to live in close association with human beings as a pet or work animal and usually creating a dependency so that the animal loses its ability to live in the wild.
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to adapt (a plant) so as to be cultivated by and beneficial to human beings.
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to accustom to household life or affairs.
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to take (something foreign, unfamiliar, etc.) for one's own use or purposes; adopt.
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to make more ordinary, familiar, acceptable, or the like.
to domesticate radical ideas.
verb (used without object)
verb
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to bring or keep (wild animals or plants) under control or cultivation
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to accustom to home life
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to adapt to an environment
to domesticate foreign trees
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
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domesticationnoun
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domesticatornoun
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overdomesticateverb (used with object)
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domesticableadjective
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domesticativeadjective
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nondomesticatedadjective
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nondomesticatingadjective
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undomesticableadjective
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undomesticatedadjective
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well-domesticatedadjective
Inflected Forms
Participles
Conjugated Forms
Present
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domesticatesimple
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domesticatessimple
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have domesticatedperfect
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has domesticatedperfect
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am domesticatingprogressive
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are domesticatingprogressive
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is domesticatingprogressive
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have been domesticatingperfect progressive
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has been domesticatingperfect progressive
Past
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domesticatedsimple
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had domesticatedperfect
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was domesticatingprogressive
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were domesticatingprogressive
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had been domesticatingperfect progressive
Future
Etymology
Origin of domesticate
First recorded in 1635–45; from Medieval Latin domesticātus (past participle of domesticāre ), equivalent to domestic- domestic + -ātus -ate 1
Explanation
To domesticate something is to tame a wild animal or plant so it can live with people. Dogs and cats are called domesticated animals because they live with us peacefully. Nobody knows who first domesticated a wolf, but whoever it was was a very important person. If people hadn't started living with wolves, slowly domesticating them and teaching them to get along with people, wolves would never have evolved into today's dogs. We usually talk about how to domesticate animals, but wild plants can be domesticated too.
Vocabulary lists containing domesticate
The Middle East and Central Asia - Introductory
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The Middle East and Central Asia - Middle School
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The Middle East and Central Asia - High School
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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.
See Examples For:
And rather than trying to domesticate every step of a supply chain, identify the true chokepoints—the raw silicon, the wafer, the chip assembly—and secure those.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 23, 2026
"We can use these modern tools to domesticate undomesticated crops."
From Science Daily ● Jan. 11, 2026
And yet none of them voted against it; some tried to domesticate it or expressed hope that South Carolina would be ready for a bill this extreme in the future.
From Slate ● Nov. 21, 2025
The impulse to domesticate performance into a comprehensible story was denied by the sensory bombardment of his productions.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jan. 7, 2025
Why did peoples outside the Fertile Crescent fail to domesticate them, and begin to grow them only when they had already been domesticated in the eastern Mediterranean and arrived thence as crops?
From "Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies" by Jared M. Diamond
It heralds “Ol’ Man River’s” heartbreak, the way enough time in Hollywood domesticates even the freest spirit into commercial relatability.
From Los Angeles Times ● Apr. 26, 2023
So these captive wolves have taken on an uneasy status: not wild, nor yet domesticates.
From The Guardian ● Nov. 24, 2020
The studio recording offers the sense of abstraction—it distills much of what Coltrane was doing in concert performances, it suggests it, it signifies it, but the album also domesticates it.
From The New Yorker ● Nov. 17, 2015
We have thousands of plant and animal domesticates that are going to have to go with us.
From Scientific American ● Dec. 19, 2012
In addition, just as Eurasia’s east-west axis permitted many of these Chinese animals and crops to spread westward in ancient times, West Asian domesticates also spread eastward to China and became important there.
From "Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies" by Jared M. Diamond
Dusky farmerfish in East Asia grow “crops” of red algae by assiduously “weeding out less palatable foods” and have effectively domesticated a type of shrimp whose waste fertilizes the algae and boosts yields.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 19, 2026
Humans, and the animals we have brought under our fold, such as dogs and horses, are still evolving and still being domesticated.
From Salon ● Apr. 23, 2026
Sheep were first domesticated approximately 10,500 years ago in the Middle East, and were eventually brought to British shores by Neolithic farmers some time around 4000BC.
From BBC ● Mar. 5, 2026
They also found that Przewalski's horses, a species closely related to domesticated horses, produce whinnies that include biphonation.
From Science Daily ● Feb. 25, 2026
The same button that controlled the ignition first dumped the ashes of the previous fire, and allowed for the entrance of fresh wood.—It was a thoroughly domesticated fireplace, you see.
From "I, Robot" by Isaac Asimov
"These people were living a primarily hunting-and-gathering lifestyle and probably had only recently begun growing crops and domesticating animals."
From Science Daily ● Feb. 14, 2024
A few thousand years later they began domesticating cotton.
From Textbooks ● Apr. 19, 2023
The origin of dogs is contentious, but I hypothesize that domesticating wolves into dogs may have helped the first modern humans to outcompete other hominins like Neandertals.
From Scientific American ● Dec. 8, 2022
But Davis argues that we should try domesticating some of the other 128 species of coffee, before they're gone.
From Salon ● Nov. 28, 2022
“They may have not so much been questioning as domesticating you.”
From "The Left Hand of Darkness" by Ursula K. Le Guin
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.
