natürliche

Natürliche is the attributive form of the German adjective natürlich, meaning natural or of nature. It describes qualities that are inherent to nature or not artificial, and it can refer to environments, processes, phenomena, or objects that occur without human intervention. As an attributive adjective, sowohl die natürliche Umgebung als auch das natürliche Phänomen illustrate how the ending changes with gender and number in different noun phrases.

In scientific and academic usage, natürliche appears in a range of composite terms, such as natürliche Selektion (natural selection), natürliche Umwelt (natural environment), and natürliche Zahlen (natural numbers). In mathematics, natürliche Zahlen denotes the set of natural numbers; conventions vary on whether zero is included, with some texts starting at 0 and others at 1. The term is also common in biology, ecology, and philosophy when distinguishing what exists in nature from what is artificial or man-made.

Grammatically, natürliche is closely related to the adverb form natürlich, which means naturally or of course, and to the noun Natürlichkeit (naturalness or authenticity). The root of the word is Natur (nature), derived from the Latin natura, through Germanic developments. The word and its inflected forms are widely used in everyday language and technical discourse alike, reflecting the core distinction between natural and artificial that permeates many disciplines.