national capital
1
2.5
- noun
- /ˈnæʃənl ˈkæpɪtl/
:
capital nacional
- Washington, D.C. is known as the national capital of the United States.
- national capital city
Examples
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In the meantime, Mussolini's dictatorship equipped its national capital with modern sports stadia.
Academic text (2010) -
Sofia, the national capital and home to one in eight Bulgarians, particularly suffered from industrial pollution.
Academic text (1995) -
So are you enjoying yourself in our national capital, young man?
Fiction book (1994) -
I did a lot of research on designed national capital cities where, in a very explicit way, design starts to be about national identity.
Academic text (2011) -
The political-bureaucratic elite and much of the nation's public and private wealth are concentrated in the center, the national capital.
Academic text (1990) -
One was the political expectations of the first leftist municipal government of Lima, the national capital.
Academic text (1999) -
In 1870, the political context changed significantly with the seizure of Rome as the national capital for united Italy.
Academic text (2006) -
A political rally is, in one sense, a dialogue between contemporaries across the physical distance separating the national capital from the periphery.
Academic text (1990) -
Lagos, a city with some twenty million residents, emerged from unplanned metropolitan growth, metastasizing from an indigenous port into the national capital of Nigeria, the country with the largest population in Africa.
Academic text (2015) -
World Bank projections indicate the Sana'a Basin—site of the national capital, Sana'a, and home to 2 million people—may be pumped dry by 2010.
Academic text (2008)
Synonyms
604
2.7
The city where a country's government works
How Important
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning 'the capital city of a nation' is directly and transparently derived from combining 'national' (relating to the country) with 'capital' (the city where government is based). This adjective + noun composition is a regular, cross-linguistically common pattern with no idiomatic shift, so a B1 learner who knows both constituents will readily infer the MWE meaning.
Etymology
The phrase national capital comes from the idea of a city's role as the 'head' of a country: capital originally meant 'head', so the national capital is the main city where the country's leaders and government are based. That's why it means 'center of government and administration'.