Traditionally

How to spell traditionally

13 letters · 5 syllables

How to pronounce traditionally

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does traditionally mean?

1. adverbIn a way that follows long-established custom or practice handed down over time.

Traditionally in a sentence

• The family traditionally gathers for a large meal on the last Sunday of the month.

• This region traditionally relied on fishing for most of its income.

Where does traditionally come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb tradere, which literally meant 'to hand over' or 'to deliver', formed from trans 'across' and dare 'to give'. From it came the noun traditio, meaning the act of handing something down, and that sense of passing on customs from one generation to the next is exactly what survives in the modern word. English took 'tradition' from Old French during the 1300s, and the adverb 'traditionally' is a much later English construction, built by stacking the adjective suffix -al and the adverb suffix -ly onto the noun. Curiously, the same Latin tradere also gave us 'traitor' and 'treason', since handing something over could mean betraying it. The long ladder of suffixes (-ion, -al, -ly) is the spelling trap here, because writers must keep the double l in -ally and not drop it to a single l.

How the word is built

• tradit- (from Latin tradere: to hand over)
• -ion (noun)
• -al (adjective)
• -ly (adverb)