Tropical

How to spell tropical

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce tropical

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does tropical mean?

1. adjectiveRelating to or characteristic of the hot, humid regions near the equator.

Tropical in a sentence

• The resort served fresh tropical fruit at every breakfast.

• Heavy tropical rain flooded the streets within minutes.

Where does tropical come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word traces back to the Greek tropikos, an adjective meaning 'of the turning', built on the noun trope, which literally meant 'a turn' or 'a turning'. Greek astronomers used it for the two circles on the celestial sphere where the sun appears to halt and turn back at the solstices, the lines we still call the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. Latin borrowed the term as tropicus, and from there it passed into English in the late 1500s as the region of the globe lying between those two lines. Because the climate there is famously hot and humid, the adjective 'tropical' soon came to describe that warmth, lush vegetation, and exotic produce rather than only the geometry of the sky. The same Greek root for turning survives in unrelated-looking relatives such as 'trophy' and the grammatical 'trope', a sense of a turn of phrase.

How the word is built

• tropic (from Greek tropikos: of the turning point of the sun)
• -al (adjective suffix)