In recent years, several results have been proposed on global stabilization of a class of nonlinear systems that are dominated by a triangular system satisfying the linear growth condition. However, in these works, at least the linear growth bound is assumed to be known in designing stabilizing controllers. In our work, we propose an adaptive output feedback control scheme in which the high-gain parameter is tuned on-line. Thus, a priori knowledge on the linear growth bound of system nonlinearities is not required in our scheme. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.