Natick (/ˈneɪtɪk/ NAY-tik) is a town in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. It is near the center of the MetroWest region of Massachusetts, with a population of 37,006 at the 2020 census. 10 miles (16 km) west of Boston, Natick is part of the Greater Boston area. Massachusetts's center of population was in Natick at the censuses of 2000–2020, most recently in the vicinity of Hunters Lane.

The name Natick comes from the language of the Massachusett Native American tribe and is commonly thought to mean "Place of Hills." A more accurate translation may be "place of [our] searching," after John Eliot's successful search for a location for his Praying Indian settlement.

Natick was settled in 1651 by John Eliot, a Puritan missionary born in Widford, England, who received a commission and funds from England's Long Parliament to settle the Massachusett Indians called Praying Indians on both sides of the Charles River, on land deeded from the settlement at Dedham. Natick was the first of Eliot's network of praying towns and served as their center for a long time. While the towns were largely self-governing under Indian leaders, such as Waban and Cutshamekin, the praying Indians were subject to rules governing conformity to Puritan culture (in practice Natick, like the other praying towns, combined both indigenous and Puritan culture and practices). Eliot and Praying Indian translators printed America's first Algonquian language Bible. Eventually, the church in Natick was led for several decades by an indigenous pastor, Rev. Daniel Takawambait.

The colonial government placed such settlements in a ring of villages around Boston as a defensive strategy. Natick was the first and best documented settlement. The land was granted by the General Court as part of the Dedham Grant.

After a period of expansion and little focus on evangelism, Reverend John Robinson told the New Englanders to prioritize missionary work over growth, "the killing of those poor Indians....How happy a thing it had been if you had converted some before you had killed any." Chastened in the wake of the Mystic Massacre which occurred during the Pequot War, sincere efforts at evangelizing began. A school was set up, a government established, and the Indians were encouraged to convert to Christianity. In November 1675, during King Philip's War, the Natick Indians were sent to Deer Island. Many died of disease and cold, and those who survived found their homes destroyed. The Indian village did not fully recover, and the land held in common by the Indian community was slowly sold to white settlers to cover debts. By 1785, most of the Natick Indians had drifted away. After King Philip's War, Elliot's and a few other missionaries' opposition to the executions and enslavement of Indians were eventually silenced by death threats.

In 1775, both European and Indian citizens of Natick participated in the battles of Lexington, Concord and Bunker Hill, as well as serving in the Continental Army. The names of Natick's Praying Indian soldiers are memorialized on a stone marker, along with all of Natick's Revolutionary War veterans, on a stone marker on Pond Street, near downtown Natick.

The town was incorporated in 1781. Henry Wilson, a U.S. senator who became the 18th Vice President of the United States (1873–1875), lived most of his life in Natick as a shoemaker and schoolteacher known as the "Natick Cobbler" and is buried there. He is the namesake of one of Natick's middle schools.

Though Natick was primarily a farming town, the invention of the sewing machine in 1858 led to the growth of several shoe factories. The business flourished and peaked by 1880, when Natick, with 23 operating factories, was third in the nation in the quantity of shoes produced. The shoes made in Natick were primarily heavy work shoes with only one or two companies making lighter dress shoes. Natick was famous for its brogan, a heavy ankle-high boot worn by soldiers in the American Civil War.