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

On Tuesday, the company unveiled Dana, a new service that allows developers to use natural language to simplify the building and testing of autonomous machines. — Reed Albergotti, semafor.com, 21 July 2026

Sailors will also be able to search technical manuals using natural language, review parts inventories, forecast maintenance issues before failures occur, and identify alternate suppliers within seconds. — Aamir Khollam, Interesting Engineering, 21 July 2026

In Spreadsheet, natural language queries generate analysis and visualizations from raw data. — Vivian Toh, Forbes.com, 17 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

Word History

First Known Use

1570, in the meaning defined at sense 1

Rhymes for natural language

• interlanguage
• metalanguage