Adjective: tribal
Comparison Forms
Synthetic
Perifrastic
| Comparative | more tribal |
| Superlative | most tribal |
Sample Sentences
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social order through tribal law
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‘What has he done?’ ‘Oh, killed a few natives. That wouldn’t count so much if it was all ‘tribal’; but he’s ‘gone cheeky’ and threatens wholesale murder. My job is to grab him before he slaughters more.’ [1937, Ion L. Idriess, Over the Range, Sydney: Angus and Robertson, published 1947, page 46:]
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a tribal society
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tribal history
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tribal techno music
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a purse with a tribal design
Adjectives inflected like tribal
priest-ridden,
unreposed,
evadible,
dissentious,
dissentient,
unforesighted,
egocentrical,
unephemeral,
unennobling,
mensuralist,
flocculent,
unseductive,
whoopsy,
whooshy,
surrogate,
Nicodian,
unrepaired,
prismatoidal,
renorenal,
unseducible, etc. (List truncated at 20 adjectives)
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. See: Latin Adjectives '
tribālis'.