Adjective
non-native (not comparable)
- Not native; not indigenous to a particular area; foreign; invasive.
2016, Greg Rubin, Lucy Warren, The Drought-Defying California Garden, Portland: Timber Press, published 2021, →ISBN, page 135:Use purple three-awn grass to replace the overused, invasive non-native weedy Mexican feather grass (Nassella tenuissima).
2023 November 24, Rory Carroll, “‘Government is not listening’: anger over immigration spills into riot on Dublin’s streets”, in The Guardian, →ISSN:The economy is at full employment and the state is flush with tax revenue but their social media feeds depict a country overrun with “non-native” predators such as Jozef Puska, a Slovak man convicted earlier this month of murdering a teacher, Ashling Murphy, in 2022.
Usage notes
- The hyphenated and solid forms are similarly common in the American corpus, while the hyphenated form outperforms the solid one by a factor of 4.3 in the British corpus.[1] GPO manual item 6.29. recommends to spell non- prefixed words without a hyphen unless an overriding consideration applies.[2]