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customary

adjectivenounattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈkʌs.tə.m(ə.)ɹi//
  • United States//ˈkʌs.təˌmɛɹ.i//

In accordance with, or established by, custom or common usage.

adjective

  1. 1

    In accordance with, or established by, custom or common usage.

    At half-past nine on this Saturday evening, the parlour of the Salutation Inn, High Holborn, contained most of its customary visitors.[…]In former days every tavern of repute kept such a room for its own select circle, a club, or society, of habitués, who met every evening, for a pipe and a cheerful glass.

    When two people met for the first time in Diaspar—or even for the hundredth—it was customary to spend an hour or so in an exchange or courtesies before getting down to business, if any.

    "If you're accused of profiling or pretextual stops, you can bring your daily logbook to court and document that pulling over motorists for 'stickler' reasons is part of your customary pattern," Remsberg writes, "not a glaring exception conveniently dusted off in the defendant's case."

    As Trevor Corson, author of “The Story of Sushi” explains, in Japan, sushi is typically eaten at a bar, where it’s customary for the customer to chat with the chef, who can recommend what’s in season. The short window during which the fish is fresh also makes it more likely to be tastier in Japan.

  2. 2

    Holding or held by custom.

    customary tenants

    The tenants are chiefly customary and heriotable.

Etymology

From Middle English custumary, from Medieval Latin custumarius. By surface analysis, custom + -ary.

noun

  1. 1

    A book containing laws and usages, or customs; a custumal.

Forms

plural
customaries
comparative
more customary
superlative
most customary
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).