Culturally

How to spell culturally

10 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce culturally

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does culturally mean?

1. adverbIn a way that relates to the customs, arts, and shared traditions of a society or group.

Culturally in a sentence

• The museum displays artefacts that are culturally significant to the region.

• The two cities differ culturally even though they sit in the same country.

Where does culturally come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin cultura, which literally meant 'a tending' or 'cultivation', as in the working of the soil, formed from the verb colere meaning 'to till, to tend, or to honour'. The agricultural sense gave English 'culture' through Old French in the 1400s, originally describing the cultivation of land and only later the cultivation of the mind and the shared customs of a people. The adjective 'cultural' appeared in the 1800s as scholars began studying societies and their traditions, and the adverb 'culturally' followed by simply adding the familiar -ly ending. The same colere root also gave us 'cultivate', 'agriculture', and even 'colony', a place that was originally settled and tended. The spelling trap sits in the unstressed middle: the -al- often vanishes in speech, so writers can drop a letter or muddle the ending, but the word is built tidily as cultur + al + ly.

How the word is built

• cultur- (from Latin cultura: cultivation, tending)
• -al (adjective suffix)
• -ly (adverb suffix)