natural language

noun

plural natural languages

1

: a language (such as English, Spanish, or Samoan) that is the native speech of a people

In its pure meaning, a natural language is a spoken language, such as English or German.

—Robert A. Edmunds

In a natural language like English or French, asserting some proposition puts you at risk of being right or wrong.

—Jared Woodard

2

: the language of ordinary speaking and writing

—often used before another noun

This framework will enable developers to integrate A.I. models into their apps, facilitating capabilities such as image generation, text creation and natural language search.

—Victor Dey

… uses artificial intelligence to understand and respond to natural language queries.

—Isaiah Murtaugh

see also:

natural language processing

Examples of natural language in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

In JadePuffer, Sysdig caught useful traces because the payloads were self narrating and included natural language reasoning, target ranking and unusually verbose comments. — Ron Schmelzer, Forbes.com, 10 July 2026

Unlike natural language, which is abundant and broadly uniform in structure, tabular data is relatively hard to find—much of the data is sensitive or proprietary—and diverse. — Benjamin Skuse, IEEE Spectrum, 9 July 2026

At the center of the shift are AI coding tools like Claude Code that can generate software with natural language prompts, reducing the need for engineers to write it line by line. — Beatrice Nolan, Fortune, 9 July 2026

Robotic teaching assistant Designed for interactive, face-to-face engagement, the M-Series robot combines natural language processing, expressive facial movements and real-time conversational abilities to communicate with students in a human-like manner during classroom activities. — Jijo Malayil, Interesting Engineering, 25 June 2026

Word History

First Known Use

1570, in the meaning defined at sense 1

Rhymes for natural language

• interlanguage
• metalanguage