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TRIBUTARY
| Pronunciation (US): |  | (GB): | |
I. (noun)
Sense 1
Meaning:
A branch that flows into the main stream
Synonyms:
affluent; confluent; feeder; tributary
Classified under:
Nouns denoting natural objects (not man-made)
Hypernyms ("tributary" is a kind of...):
branch (a stream or river connected to a larger one)
Antonym:
distributary (a branch of a river that flows away from the main stream and does not rejoin it)
II. (adjective)
Sense 1
Meaning:
Tending to bring about; being partly responsible for
Example:
a contributory factor
Synonyms:
conducive; contributing; contributive; contributory; tributary
Classified under:
Similar:
causative (producing an effect)
Sense 2
Meaning:
Paying tribute
Example:
a tributary colony
Classified under:
Similar:
obligated (caused by law or conscience to follow a certain course)
Sense 3
Meaning:
(of a stream) flowing into a larger stream
Classified under:
Adjectives
Similar:
secondary (being of second rank or importance or value; not direct or immediate)
Context examples:
A large blood vessel formed by the anterior and deep middle cerebral veins and small branches from the insula and cerebral peduncles which receives tributaries from the temporal horn and the medial temporal lobe and is joined by the inferior striate veins.
(Basal Cerebral Vein of Rosenthal, NCI Thesaurus)
She might be firm, but only by relationship, and in an inferior and tributary degree.
(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)
On the fourth day after leaving Manaos we turned into a tributary which at its mouth was little smaller than the main stream.
(The Lost World, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
Its three major tributary glaciers are fed by their own tributaries farther inland.
(Antarctica’s Larsen B Ice Shelf Nearing Its Final Act, NASA)
I was still giddy with the shock of my mother's death, and in a kind of stunned state as to all tributary things.
(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)
Thus our expedition was at the time of the dry season, when the great river and its tributaries were more or less in a normal condition.
(The Lost World, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
I was returning, my work accomplished, when I had occasion to spend a night at a small Indian village at a point where a certain tributary—the name and position of which I withhold—opens into the main river.
(The Lost World, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
You are aware—or probably, in this half-educated age, you are not aware—that the country round some parts of the Amazon is still only partially explored, and that a great number of tributaries, some of them entirely uncharted, run into the main river.
(The Lost World, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
