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ENGLISH · A WORD WITH POSSIBILITIES

tribal.

Of or relating to tribes.

6 characters2 syllables approx.English language

Meaning & usage

adj/ˈtɹaɪbəl/UK, US
  1. Of or relating to tribes.

    social order through tribal law
  2. Based on or organized according to tribes.

    a tribal society
  3. Phylogenic.

    historical · rare
    tribal history
  4. Incorporating designs or styles typical of an indigenous people.

    tribal techno music
    a purse with a tribal design
Where this word comes from

From Latin tribālis. By surface analysis, tribe + -al, first attested in the 1630s. The specific adjectival sense under the defunct theory of recapitulation derives from tribal history as an overly literal learned borrowing from German Stammesgeschichte; ordinarily, Stamm would only be translated as tribe when used in its ethnographic sense.

noun/ˈtɹaɪbəl/UK, US
  1. A design or image that has been influenced by indigenous peoples; especially such a tattoo.

  2. A member of a tribe.

    India
Where this word comes from

From Latin tribālis. By surface analysis, tribe + -al, first attested in the 1630s. The specific adjectival sense under the defunct theory of recapitulation derives from tribal history as an overly literal learned borrowing from German Stammesgeschichte; ordinarily, Stamm would only be translated as tribe when used in its ethnographic sense.

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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.

Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.