Stadial
adj, noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 A short, colder period within an interglacial; a stade.
- 1 Pertaining to a glacial stade.
- 2 Pertaining to or existing in successive stages of a given culture, society etc.
"He drew on the growing ethnographic record contained in travellers' tales about extra-European societies to develop a stadial view of human evolution according to which each society passed through the stages of hunting, pastoral life, farming, and trading – a schema which had no place for scriptural precept."
Example
More examples"He drew on the growing ethnographic record contained in travellers' tales about extra-European societies to develop a stadial view of human evolution according to which each society passed through the stages of hunting, pastoral life, farming, and trading – a schema which had no place for scriptural precept."
Etymology
From Latin stadiālis, from stadium.
Related phrases
More for "stadial"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.