tribal

Reading level: hard

Estimated CEFR level: C1 — Advanced

Estimated from word frequency; not an official CEFR classification.

Definition

  1. adjective relating to or characteristic of a tribe

Etymology

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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