Gila

See also: gila

English

Etymology

From Spanish Gila, from a native (Yuma?) name.

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /ˈhiː.lə/

Proper noun

Gila

1. A 649-mile (1,044 km) tributary of the Colorado River which flows through New Mexico and Arizona in the United States.
   • 1895, J[ohn] W[esley] Powell, chapter I, in Canyons of the Colorado, Meadville, PA: Flood & Vincent; republished as The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons, New York: Dover, 1961, →ISBN, →OCLC, page 20:

     Some of its tributaries rise in the mountains to the south, in the territory belonging to the republic of Mexico, but the Gila gathers the greater part of its waters from a great plateau on the northeast.

   • 1954, Wallace Stegner, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West, Houghton Mifflin, →LCCN, →OCLC, page 277:

     On that map the Colorado River headed near the headwaters of the Del Norte (Rio Grande) and ran almost straight southwest to the Gulf of California. The Gila joined it at right angles, precisely at its mouth.

2. A census-designated place in Grant County, New Mexico

Derived terms

• Gila chub (Gila intermedia)
• Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument
• Gila County
• Gila manroot (Marah gilensis)
• Gila monster (Heloderma suspectum)
• Gila National Forest
• Gila River
• Gila springsnail (Pyrgulopsis gilae)
• Gila sucker (Catostomus insignis)
• Gila topminnow (Poeciliopsis occidentalis)
• Gila trout (Oncorhynchus gilae)
• Gila tryonia (Tryonia gilae)
• Gila Wilderness
• Gila woodpecker (Melanerpes uropygialis)

 

Noun

Gila (plural Gilas)

1. A Gila monster.
   • 1964, Will Barker, Familiar reptiles and amphibians of America, page 92:

     The dealers in live Gilas were paying local trappers twenty-five to fifty cents an inch; in turn the lizards were being sold to out-of-state dealers at one to two dollars an inch.

2. A Gila trout.
   • 1998, Rex Johnson, Ron Smorynski, Fly-fishing in Southern New Mexico, →ISBN, page 99:

     In addition, area streams containing Gilas provide potential for far more fishing than any brown trout water — first, because the Gilas ...

   • 2013, Bob W. Willis, Trout Adventures, →ISBN, page 109:

     There were trout, they were small, and they were not Gilas.

Anagrams

• Alig, Gail, Liga, glia