Word.ws English Dictionary

natives

Syllables: na·tives/ˈneɪtɪvz/

natives is the plural of native.

Meaning of native

Noun

native (plural natives)

  1. A person who is native to a place; a person who was born in a place.
  2. A person of aboriginal descent, as distinguished from a person who was or whose ancestors were foreigners or settlers/colonizers. Alternative letter-case form of Native (aboriginal inhabitant of the Americas or Australia).
    • Mail trains are limited to first and second class passengers, but on the mixed trains third class is also provided, and this is patronised exclusively by natives.1940 December, O. S. M. Raw, “The Rhodesia Railways—II”, in Railway Magazine, page 640
  3. A native speaker.
  4. A native plant or animal.
    Antonyms:
    exotic
  5. An oyster of species Ostrea edulis.

See all 22 meanings of native

Noun capitalized: Natives

Natives

  1. (plural) plural of Native

Phrases with natives

Questions about natives

What is natives the plural of?
Natives is the plural of native.
What part of speech is natives?
Natives is a noun.
How do you pronounce natives?
Natives is pronounced /ˈneɪtɪvz/.

Words near natives in the dictionary

  1. nativelike
  2. nativelikeness
  3. natively
  4. nativeness
  5. nativenesses
  6. natives
  7. Natividad
  8. nativisation
  9. nativise
  10. nativised
  11. nativises

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: natives (page history and authors); Natives (page history and authors); native (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-us-natives.ogg.

Cite this entry: “natives.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/natives. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.