specialized

American  

[spesh-uh-lahyzd] / ˈspɛʃ əˌlaɪzd /

especially British, specialised

adjective

1. invested with a special character or restricted to a special function or field of activity.

   He campaigned for a specialized burn department to be established at the hospital.

   The humanities, once a highly specialized pursuit, have rapidly become a much broader conversation.

2. Biology. (of an organism or organ) adapted to a special function or environment.

   If the coastal sage scrub were to vanish, so would these specialized species of insects that are dependent on it.

---

verb

1. the simple past tense and past participle of specialize.

Other Word Forms

• nonspecialized adjective
• overspecialized adjective
• unspecialized adjective

Etymology

Origin of specialized

specialize ( def. ) + -ed ² ( def. )

Example Sentences

Anthropic and OpenAI could use their cutting-edge artificial intelligence technologies to do jobs now handled by specialized software, displacing some of the hundreds of companies that produce those programs.

From Barron's

Inside cells, ions travel through specialized protein channels embedded in the cell membrane.

From Science Daily

Some lawyers with specialized skills are even more aggressively pushing the upper limit.

From The Wall Street Journal

Software stocks, meanwhile, are taking a beating as investors focus on the possibility that AI could handle tasks now done by specialized programs.

From Barron's

Demand for specialized skills helps drive those pay levels.

From The Wall Street Journal