Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • adjective Of, occurring in, or characteristic of the tropics.
  • adjective Hot and humid; torrid.
  • noun A tropical plant.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • In some radiolarians, as the Acanthonida, noting the position of certain spines which project in the region between the poles and the equator of the skeleton.
  • Of or pertaining to the tropics; being within the tropics; characteristic of the tropics or of the climate of the tropics.
  • In zoögeog., inhabiting the tropics; tropicopolitan.
  • Incident to the tropics: as, tropical diseases.
  • Figurative; rhetorically changed from its proper or original sense.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • adjective Of or pertaining to the tropics; characteristic of, or incident to, the tropics; being within the tropics
  • adjective Rhetorically changed from its exact original sense; being of the nature of a trope; figurative; metaphorical.
  • adjective See Lunar month, under Month.
  • adjective the solar year; the period occupied by the sun in passing from one tropic or one equinox to the same again, having a mean length of 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, 46.0 seconds, which is 20 minutes, 23.3 seconds shorter than the sidereal year, on account of the precession of the equinoxes.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • adjective Of or pertaining to the tropics, the equatorial region between 23 degrees north and 23 degrees south.
  • adjective From or similar to a hot humid climate, e.g. tropical fruit, tropical weather.
  • noun A tropical plant.
  • adjective literature, rhetoric Of or relating to a trope.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • adjective characterized by or of the nature of a trope or tropes; changed from its literal sense
  • adjective of or relating to the tropics, or either tropic
  • adjective relating to or situated in or characteristic of the tropics (the region on either side of the equator)
  • adjective of weather or climate; hot and humid as in the tropics

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From tropic +‎ -al

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From trope

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