# tropical

Pronunciation: US say "TROH-pi-kuhl" /ˈtɹoʊ.pɪ.kəl/; UK say "TRO-pi-kuhl" /ˈtɹɒp.ɪ.kəl/; AUS say "TRAW-pi-kuhl" /ˈtɹɔp.ɪ.kəl/

## Adjective

1. Belonging to or characteristic of the tropics, the warm region of Earth lying between about 23 degrees north and 23 degrees south of the equator.
   - Simple: Belonging to or found in the hot regions near the equator.
   - _Many tropical nations lie within a few degrees of the equator._
   - _The expedition studied rainfall patterns across the tropical belt._
2. Coming from a hot, humid climate, or having the warm, moist quality of one.
   - Simple: Hot and damp, like the weather in a steamy jungle.
   - _The bathroom turned tropical after his long, steaming shower._
   - _By midday the swamp air had grown tropical and heavy._
4. Relating to tropical geometry, a branch of mathematics built on a number system where addition is replaced by taking the minimum or maximum and multiplication by ordinary addition.
   - Simple: Belonging to a type of math where you take the smaller or larger of two numbers instead of adding them.
   - _The seminar explored how tropical curves arise from polynomial equations._
   - _Researchers used a tropical approach to simplify the optimization problem._

## Noun

3. A plant that grows in or comes from the warm, humid tropics.
   - Simple: A plant that grows naturally in hot, wet parts of the world.
   - _The nursery's back room was crowded with tropicals from the rainforest._
   - _A tropical like this won't survive a hard frost._

## Adjective

5. Relating to, involving, or having the nature of a trope or tropes; figurative or metaphorical. *(dated)*
   - Simple: Using a word to mean something other than its plain, everyday meaning.
   - _Taken in its tropical sense, the shepherd of the psalm stands for God and the flock for his people._
   - _She read the passage as tropical, not literal, treating each image as a figure of speech._

## Origin

Formed from "tropic" with the suffix "-al".

Source: DictionaryAI, https://dictionaryai.com/define/tropical (written from Wiktionary data, CC BY-SA 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).