Tributaries

How to spell tributaries

11 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce tributaries

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does tributaries mean?

1. nounSmaller streams or rivers that flow into a larger river or lake.
2. nounStates or rulers that pay tribute to a more powerful nation or empire.

Tributaries in a sentence

• The survey mapped every one of the river's tributaries before the dam was built.

• The empire demanded gold and grain from its conquered tributaries each year.

• Heavy rain swelled the mountain tributaries that feed the reservoir.

• Several neighbouring kingdoms became tributaries of the larger power after the war.

Where does tributaries come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb tribuere, which meant 'to allot, assign, or pay', a verb itself rooted in tribus, the term for one of the original divisions or 'tribes' of the Roman people, since obligations were once shared out among those tribes. From tribuere came tributum, the regular payment or 'tribute' that a subject people owed to a ruling power, and the adjective tributarius described anyone or anything that paid such tribute. English adopted the word in the late 1300s, first for states and rulers obliged to pay tribute, and by the 1600s the image had been borrowed by geographers: a smaller stream was pictured as 'paying its dues' of water to the main river. The same tribuere root surfaces in everyday relatives such as 'contribute', 'distribute', and 'attribute', and noticing that shared -tribut- core helps fix the spelling before the easily slurred -aries ending.

How the word is built

• tribut- (from Latin tribuere: to allot, pay)
• -ary (relating to)
• -es (plural)