specialization
Americannoun
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specializations
plural
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the act of specializing, or pursuing a particular line of study or work.
Medical students with high student loans often feel driven into specialization.
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Biology. the adaptation of an organism or organ to a special function or environment.
Basic biology suggests the selective pressures leading to convergent evolutionary specialization among desert-dwelling species.
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the act of being restricted to some specific, or the act of becoming specialized.
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Nouns
Etymology
Origin of specialization
Explanation
If you have a specialization, that means you focus on a specific aspect of a larger topic. If you’re a nurse, your specialization might be pediatric care, which means you focus on providing care to infants and children. You probably notice that the word special makes up a big part of specialization, which can help you remember its meaning. Your specialization is your special subject or skill. If you’re planning on studying biology in college, your advisor eventually will ask what your area of specialization will be. When you graduate, you’ll know a lot about biology in general, but there’ll be a particular area — such as marine biology or rodent reproduction — that you studied deeply.
Vocabulary lists containing specialization
The Industrial Revolution - Introductory
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Cell Biology - Middle School
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Cell Biology - 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:
Researchers say the species uses a powerful spring-loaded silk trap to capture a single type of prey, catching one ant at a time in what they describe as "the ultimate specialization."
From Science Daily ● Jun. 26, 2026
The careers most at risk are the mirror image: roles built on processing information at scale without deep specialization.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 10, 2026
Pay can vary widely depending on specialization, setting and hours.
From MarketWatch ● Apr. 28, 2026
Finally, general intelligence depends on balancing local specialization with global integration.
From Science Daily ● Mar. 3, 2026
Economic specialization is more extreme, to the point where today not even farmers remain self-sufficient.
From "Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies" by Jared M. Diamond
The population is too small to support many medical specializations, such as kidney transplants.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Feb. 24, 2026
There’s still no definitive winner among AI models, Sette believes, and Anthropic’s product performs very well in specializations such as coding.
From MarketWatch ● Oct. 11, 2025
It provides a starting point for tracing the evolution of venom genes in the ancestors of Hymenoptera as well as specializations within the group.
From Science Daily ● Nov. 29, 2023
That work is beginning to yield new insights about the tongue’s evolutionary trajectories, and how its specializations fueled further diversification.
From Science Magazine ● May 24, 2023
The results of the ethnologists are so tangled here that one has to be cautious when one or another of them draws conclusions concerning immigrations, because of certain local or territorial specializations.
From The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes by Austin Craig
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.
