Origin: Latin suffix -tion
Integration has 4 different meanings across 1 category:
the action of incorporating a racial or religious group into a community
"The new neighborhood association holds regular potlucks to foster integration by bringing together families from diverse cultural backgrounds."
the act of combining into an integral whole
"a consolidation of two corporations"
"after their consolidation the two bills were passed unanimously"
"the defendants asked for a consolidation of the actions against them"
an operation used in the calculus whereby the integral of a function is determined
"After struggling with differentiation, she finally solved the problem by performing integration to find the area under the curve."
The act or process of making whole or entire.
"After years of fragmentation, the team finally achieved full integration by merging their separate codebases into a single, cohesive system."
In plain English: Integration is when different parts come together to form a single, complete whole.
"The new software integration allows the company to share data between its different systems easily."
Usage: Use integration to describe the action of combining separate parts into a single, unified whole, such as merging different software modules. Avoid using it simply to mean adding something new unless that addition is specifically meant to create a cohesive system.
The word integration comes from the French intégration, which was borrowed from the Latin integratio. It originally referred to the act of making something whole or complete by restoring its parts.