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ameliorative. In DICTIOUS you will not only get to know all the dictionary meanings for the word
ameliorative, but we will also tell you about its etymology, its characteristics and you will know how to say
ameliorative in singular and plural. Everything you need to know about the word
ameliorative you have here. The definition of the word
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English
Etymology
From ameliorate + -ive.
Adjective
ameliorative (comparative more ameliorative, superlative most ameliorative)
- Able to repair or ameliorate.
- (linguistics) Suggesting or relating to a positive or approving evaluation.
2016, Olga Panić Kavgić, “Linguistic Creativity at Work: Nicknames of Women Tennis Players”, in English Studies Today, archived from the original on 20 August 2018:[…] personal nicknames can generally be divided into positively marked (ameliorative) ones, usually given by family members and friends as a sign of affection and acceptance, and those negatively marked (pejorative or derogatory), whose aim is to mock or ridicule a person […]
- (philosophy) Of or relating to conceptual engineering, the normative study of which conceptual demarcation is most conducive to solve the problems the concept is a priori taken to solve.
- ameliorative inquiry
- ameliorative analysis
- ameliorative project
Antonyms
Hypernyms
Derived terms
Translations
able to repair or ameliorate
Noun
ameliorative (plural amelioratives)
- That which betters or improves.
1973, Alan Gartner, Public service employment, page 106:With such conventional Keynesian amelioratives, the economy normally recovers with output and employment on the rise, and, unfortunately, with inflation picking up too.
1944, Charles Smith, An Economic Plan for Democracy, page 3:It certainly means the stripping from Parliament of endless debates on niggling parsimonies and trivial amelioratives; the thousand and one unreal fights and distractions which has kept democracy from winning the other half of freedom.
- (linguistics, rare) A linguistic unit (such as a word, morpheme) that implies a positive or approving evaluation.
- Antonym: pejorative
2015, Nicola Grandi, Edinburgh Handbook of Evaluative Morphology, page 4:Moreover, diminutives, augmentatives, pejoratives and amelioratives have always been analysed as independent categories, neglecting the possible interrelations among them.