gila
/ˈhiː.lə/
gila adjective: mad; crazy; insane.
Adjective
gila (not comparable)
Proper noun capitalized: Gila
Gila
- A 649-mile (1,044 km) tributary of the Colorado River which flows through New Mexico and Arizona in the United States.
- Some of its tributaries rise in the mountains to the south, in the territory belonging to the republic of Mexico, but the Gila gathers the greater part of its waters from a great plateau on the northeast.1895, J[ohn] W[esley] Powell, chapter I, in Canyons of the Colorado, Meadville, PA: Flood & Vincent; republished as The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons, New York: Dover, 1961...
- On that map the Colorado River headed near the headwaters of the Del Norte (Rio Grande) and ran almost straight southwest to the Gulf of California. The Gila joined it at right angles, precisely at its mouth.1954, Wallace Stegner, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West, Houghton Mifflin, →LCCN, →OCLC, page 277
- A census-designated place in Grant County, New Mexico.
Noun capitalized: Gila
Gila (plural Gilas)
- A Gila monster.
- The dealers in live Gilas were paying local trappers twenty-five to fifty cents an inch; in turn the lizards were being sold to out-of-state dealers at one to two dollars an inch.1964, Will Barker, Familiar reptiles and amphibians of America, page 92
- A Gila trout.
- In addition, area streams containing Gilas provide potential for far more fishing than any brown trout water — first, because the Gilas ...1998, Rex Johnson, Ron Smorynski, Fly-fishing in Southern New Mexico, →ISBN, page 99
- There were trout, they were small, and they were not Gilas.2013, Bob W. Willis, Trout Adventures, →ISBN, page 109
Synonyms of gila
Forms of gila
| plural | Gilas |
|---|
Origin of gila
Borrowed from Malay gila.
From Spanish Gila, from a native (Yuma?) name.
Words formed from gila
- Gila chub
- Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument
- Gila County
- Gila manroot
- Gila monster
- Gila National Forest
- Gila River
- Gila springsnail
- Gila sucker
- Gila topminnow
- Gila trout
- Gila tryonia
- Gila Wilderness
- Gila woodpecker
Phrases with gila
Questions about gila
- What does gila mean?
- Gila means mad; crazy; insane.
- What part of speech is gila?
- Gila can be an adjective, a proper noun or a noun.
- How do you pronounce gila?
- Gila is pronounced /ˈhiː.lə/.
Words near gila in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: gila (page history and authors); Gila (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.
Last updated:
Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-Gila.wav.
Cite this entry: “gila.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/gila. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.