putative

English

WOTD – 7 March 2010

Etymology

First attested 1432, from Middle French putatif, from Latin putātīvus (“supposed, purported”), from putātus (“thought”), from putō (“I think, I consider, I reckon”).

Pronunciation

(UK) IPA^(key): /ˈpju.tə.tɪv/
- Audio (Southern England): (file)
(US) IPA^(key): /ˈpju.tə.tɪv/,
(General Australian) IPA^(key): /ˈpjʉ.tə.tɪv/,

Adjective

putative (comparative more putative, superlative most putative)

Commonly believed or deemed to be the case; generally assumed.
Synonyms: reputed, supposed
- 1989, William E. Colby and Jeremy J. Stone, "US must support Thailand if Cambodia is to survive," Milwaukee Sentinel (Los Angeles Times Service), 28 Oct. (retrieved 15 Sep. 2009):
  Just as Prince Sihanouk is fronting for the Khmer Rouge today . . . so also was he their putative leader from 1970 to 1975.
- 1991 May 24, Clement Dore, Moral Scepticism, Springer, →ISBN, page 85:
  If they are in fact sound, then, of course, desire-utilitarianism need not account for the putative wrongness of infanticide.
- 1995, Henry E. Allison, “Spontaneity and Autonomy in Kant's Conception of the Self”, in Karl Ameriks and Dieter Sturma, editors, The Modern Subject: Conceptions of the Self in Classical German Philosophy, page 24:
  This independence is still presupposed as a condition of agency; but this presupposition leaves in place the epistemic possibility that our putative freedom is illusory, that we are automata rather than agents.
- 2017 January 10, Jonathan Buchsbaum, Exception Taken: How France Has Defied Hollywood's New World Order, Columbia University Press, →ISBN, page 107:
  But Dejouany, like many others, was seduced by the charm and putative brilliance of this man of vision and handed over the reins to Messier in 1996.
Accepted by supposition rather than as a result of proof.
- 1831, The Quarterly Christian Spectator, page 504:
  In answer to the objection, that if a thing is only putative, it is fictitious
- 1879 November 9, Maurice Mauris, “A Materialistic Artist”, in New York Times, page 10:
  he lady . . . insisted upon going herself, requesting me to mind for a second the baby. . . . lo! the baby awoke and stared at me with a pair of big frightened eyes, which the little thing in another moment rolled in all directions, as if in search of its putative mother.
- 1985, Thomas J. Scorza, Dan K. Webb, Scott F. Turow, In the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Court No. 84-1141: United States of America, Plaintiff-Appellee, vs. James Lendmann, Defendant-Appellant. Brief and Appendix for the United States, page 11:
  The government submits there is no inconsistency between the jury's putative conclusion that Lendmann did not intend to distribute the charged 3.59 grams of methamphetamine and its clear conclusions that Lendmann knowingly manufactured the same and knowingly attempted to make a kilogram more.
- 1993, United States. Congress. House. Committee on Armed Services, Policy Implications of Lifting the Ban on Homosexuals in the Military: Hearings Before the Committee on Armed Services, House of Representatives, One Hundred Third Congress, First Session, Hearings Held May 4 and 5, 1993, page 285:
  You have the putative assumption, because everybody is interrogated, that everybody who has entered is heterosexual.
- 2016 May 23, Max Deutscher, In Sensible Judgement, Routledge, →ISBN, page 99:
  We mistakenly identify the reasoning that we employ in order to show that a putative judgement is grounded, with what makes for the difference between its being a judgement rather than guesswork.
- 2023 December 22, Anja Geitmann, Plant Cell Walls: Research Milestones and Conceptual Insights, CRC Press, →ISBN:
  The capacity of monoclonal antibodies such as 2F4 to identify the egg-box structure is only putative as Liners et al. (1989) mention in the abstract: “The epitope recognised is probably part of the dimers of pectin chains associated according to the 'egg-box' model,” and there is no definitive evidence of a strong specificity to such structures in muro.
Alleged, purported, ostensible, professed.
- 2006 August 18, Unmesh Kher, “No Neat Endings for the JonBenet Case”, in Time:
  Karr's past does raise suspicions. When he was arrested in Bangkok, he was living in a dormitory-like guesthouse in a neighborhood frequented by sex tourists. . . . Of course, Karr's putative pedophilia would not make him guilty of murder.
- 2016 April 1, Pål Kolstø, Strategies of Symbolic Nation-building in South Eastern Europe, Routledge, →ISBN, page 13:
  Nation-building strategies have two prongs: they aim as creating unity within, and difference without. […] It is not enough to tear down walls among the members of the putative nation: one must also erect imaginary boundaries around them that separate them from the outside world.
- 2016 August 11, Mary Karr, “The Crotchgrabber”, in The New Yorker‎:
  I’ve been subject to several gropings and gross jibes of the type you’d expect behind a junior-high gym dance, and they’ve been delivered by grownups, putative pals, not one of whom I even dimly considered getting jiggy with.
(loose or possibly mistaken use) (Can we verify⁽⁺⁾ this sense?) Prospective, potential, proposed, possible.
- 1981, Michael Rush, Parliamentary Government in Britain, New York : Holmes & Meier Publishers:
  Paralleling this extension of government control was the development of a formally constituted opposition […] In some cases a former Prime Minister was clearly acknowledged as leader and putative Prime Minister , in others a generally-accepted leader emerged.
- 2004, Katherine Joslin, Jane Addams: A Writer's Life, University of Illinois Press, →ISBN, page 74:
  She requested that no announcement be made of the promised book until she had more of it down on paper. Having put some distance between herself and her putative book, she relaxed by continuing to lecture and to work on other projects.
- 2008 November 27, Egon Börger, Antonio Cisternino, Advances in Software Engineering: Lipari Summer School 2007, Lipari Island, Italy, July 8-21, 2007, Revised Tutorial Lectures, Springer, →ISBN, page 13:
  One of the criteria of design selection is therefore availability of applicable analysis techniques specifically adapted to the putative design. When Robert Stephenson was considering possible designs for a railway bridge over the Menai, he considered, but eventually rejected, a suspension bridge.
- 2009 October 1, Christian Wolmar, Fire and Steam: A New History of the Railways in Britain, Atlantic Books Ltd, →ISBN:
  He was sacked from the Liverpool & Manchester and his place as surveyor was taken by Charles Vignoles, a slender Irishman who had recently carried out an excellent survey of the route between London and Brighton for another putative railway.
- 2011 November 3, P. W. Preston, England after the Great Recession: Tracking the Political and Cultural Consequences of the Crisis, Springer, →ISBN, page 70:
  The text was then promptly rejected in France and a little later in the Netherlands and as these were both core founding members the putative constitution was politically finished.
- 2018 July 20, Samuel J Fell, Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen, John Shand, “Music reviews: John Coltrane, Bob Dylan and Catherine Britt”, in Sydney Morning Herald‎:
  From the duration of the material (47 minutes) it seems the clear intent was to record an album, rather than just lay down a few tracks. [...] Because the putative album was not released Coltrane never named the originals, which are delineated by Impulse's numbering system.
- 2018 07, Richard Tomlinson, Marcus Spiller, Australia's Metropolitan Imperative: An Agenda for Governance Reform, CSIRO PUBLISHING, →ISBN, page 104:
  Without a metro mayor, negotiation about a devolution deal may have collapsed amid the kind of acrimony evident in other putative city-regions in respect of the perceived imposition of an unwanted elected figurehead (Cox 2016).
- 2023 October 7, Dan Hodges, “Can Labour's Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves serve up the right dish for business after years on the scrambled egg circuit?”, in Mail on Sunday‎:
  The process of selecting which businesses should be allowed to kiss the ring of putative Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, and presumptive Chancellor Reeves, has not been left to chance.