Word.ws English Dictionary

native-born

native-born adjective: being a native and inhabitant of the same place; living where one was born.

Adjective

native-born (not comparable)

  1. Being a native and inhabitant of the same place; living where one was born.
    • Our conversation was entirely in Malay, as that is the official language here, and in fact the mother-tongue and only language of the controlleur, who is a native-born half-breed.1869, Alfred Russel Wallace, The Malay Archipelago, volume I, London: Macmillan and Co., page 384
    • The native-born and the "naturalised" locomotives have been giving way to the standardised types, of which the L.M.S.R. class "5" 4-6-0 has led the way and has penetrated the furthest.1958 July, J. P. Wilson, “Scottish Soliloquy”, in Railway Magazine, page 495
  2. Born in the country of citizenship.
    • “There are a lot of jobs in the US that native-born people don’t want – and foreign-born people are happy to have,” said Stephanie Roth, chief economist at Wolfe Research.2025 July 25, Matt Egan, “How Trump’s mass deportations could backfire on the American economy by shrinking paychecks”, in CNN Business

Noun

native-born (plural native-borns)

  1. A person who was born in the country of their citizenship.
  2. A person who was born as a citizen of a specified country.

Antonyms of native-born

Forms of native-born

pluralnative-borns

Origin of native-born

From native + born.

Questions about native-born

What does native-born mean?
Native-born means being a native and inhabitant of the same place; living where one was born.
What part of speech is native-born?
Native-born can be an adjective or a noun.

Words near native-born in the dictionary

  1. native titles
  2. native tobacco
  3. native tongue
  4. native tongues
  5. native wit
  6. native-born
  7. native-borns
  8. native-like
  9. native-speaker
  10. native-speakerism
  11. native-speaking

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: native-born (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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