Word.ws English Dictionary

gentilitial

gentilitial adjective: specific to a people; national.

Adjective

gentilitial (comparative more gentilitial, superlative most gentilitial)

  1. (obsolete) specific to a people; national
  2. (obsolete) hereditary; entailed on a family
  3. Synonym of gentilicial.
    • Occasionally – as for example in the paintings of the Tomb of the Inscriptions at Tarquinii – members of the gentilitial class to which the family of the dead man belonged may also be seen dancing.1955, Massimo Pallottino, The Etruscans, Penguin Books, published 1956, page 184
    • The tribe, as its name (phyle) shows, had an ethnical or gentilitial origin.1965, François Chamoux, The Civilization of Greece, page 312
    Synonyms:
    gentilicial

Noun

gentilitial (plural gentilitials)

  1. Synonym of gentilicial.
    • The easy to remember and pronounce disyllabic gentilitials such as “Aztec,” “Toltec,” “Olmec,” and “Mixtec,” were readily accepted and have become so deeply entrenched that any attempt to replace them with putatively technically more correct terms would seem hopelessly doomed.1982, H. B. Nicholson, “The Mixteca-Puebla Concept Revisited”, in The Art and Iconography of late Post-Classic Central Mexico: A Conference at Dumbarton Oaks, October 22nd and 23rd, 1977, Washington...
    • The suffix -it was most likely added originally to root morphemes ending in -ī (e.g., Palaeosyrian ’à-rí-tum /harītum/, “pregnant”; Hebrew bəkīt, “crying”) and to gentilitials in -iy > ī (§29.41) in order to form their feminine (e.g. Mō’ābīt, “Moabite”) , although a formation with addition of -at >...1997, Edward Lipiński, Semitic Languages: Outline of a Comparative Grammar (Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta), Leuven: Peeters, →ISBN, page 226
    Synonyms:
    gentilicial

Synonyms of gentilitial

Forms of gentilitial

Adjective
comparativemore gentilitial
superlativemost gentilitial
Noun
pluralgentilitials

Origin of gentilitial

From Latin gentīlitius + -al. See gentile.

Questions about gentilitial

What does gentilitial mean?
Gentilitial means specific to a people; national.
What part of speech is gentilitial?
Gentilitial can be an adjective or a noun.

Words near gentilitial in the dictionary

  1. gentilises
  2. gentilish
  3. gentilising
  4. gentilism
  5. gentilisms
  6. gentilitial
  7. gentilitials
  8. gentilitian
  9. gentilities
  10. gentilitious
  11. gentility

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: gentilitial (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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