Pronounced: ih-RIH-stick, adj
Notes: Good word, but I don’t think I know it
Yesterday’s word
The word tribology is “the study of interacting surfaces in relative motion and associated issues, such as friction, lubrication, and wear”.
First usage
Our word came into English in the 1960s
Background / Comments
Your misunderstanding of this word depends upon how the first syllable is pronounced; before I looked, I thought “trih”, and thought of “tribbles”, which I knew it wasn’t, since tribbles are a work of fiction. If you pronounced it “try”, you could logically think it is the study of tribes. As I understand it, a group of engineers working with lubrication wanted a fancier name for what they did, and one of the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary came up with our word. It came from the Greek word tribos (rubbing), which came from tribein (to rub).
Richard's Vocabulary Word-of-the-Day 