Noun

Singular tradition

Plural traditions

tradition (plural traditions)

1. A part of culture that is passed from person to person or generation to generation, possibly differing in detail from family to family, such as the way to celebrate holidays.
   • 1920, T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, in The Sacred Wood:

     Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, "tradition" should positively be discouraged.

   • 1850, Charles Dickens, A Christmas Tree:

     After breakfast, Charles Macdoodle told Lady Mary that it was a tradition in the family that those rumbling carriages on the terrace betokened death.

2. A commonly held system.

Derived terms

• traditional
• traditionally
• traditionalism

Synonyms

• (a commonly held system): doctrine

The word tradition comes from the Latin traditionem, acc. of traditio which means "handing over, passing on", and is used in a number of ways in the English language:

1. Beliefs or customs taught by one generation to the next, often orally. For example, we can speak of the tradition of sending birth announcements.
2. A set of customs or practices. For example, we can speak of Christmas traditions.
3. A broad religious movement made up of religious denominations or church bodies that have a common history, customs, culture, and, to some extent, body of teachings. For example, one can speak of Islam's Sufi tradition or Christianity's Lutheran tradition.

However, on a more basic theoretical level, tradition(s) can be seen as information or composed of information. For that which is brought into the present from the past, in a particular societal context, is information. This is even more fundamental than particular acts or practices even if repeated over a long sequence of time.

Tradition refers to the adherence to practices handed down from generations past.

Sourced

• You do not understand your own tradition if you do not see it in relation to others.
  • John Searle, "The Storm Over the University", The New York Review of Books (December 6, 1990).

Unsourced

• All persons ought to endeavor to follow what is right, and not what is established.
  • Aristotle

• Often, the less there is to justify a traditional custom, the harder it is to get rid of it.
  • Mark Twain

• ...tradition and custom becomes intertwined and are a strong coercion which directs the society upon fixed lines, and strangles liberty.
  • William Graham Sumner

• In that the wisdom of the few becomes available to the many, there is progress in human affairs; without it, the static routine of tradition continues.
  • Joseph Jastrow

• Again men have been kept back as by a kind of enchantment from progress in science by reverence for antiquity, by the authority of men counted great in philosophy, and then by general consent.
  • Francis Bacon

• Traditionalists are pessimists about the future and optimists about the past.
  • Lewis Mumford

• Tradition is an important help to history, but its statements should be carefully scrutinized before we rely on them.
  • Joseph Addison

• The bird that would soar above the plain of tradition and prejudice must have strong wings.
  • Kate Chopin

From Wikiquote under the GNU Free Documentation License.
Wed Sep 16 00:52:56 2009