Dictionary

ameliorative en · ADJ

Pronunciation

• /əˈmiːliəɹətɪv/ (UK, US)
• (General-American) audio

Etymology

Etymology tree English ameliorate Latin -īvus Old French -ifbor. Middle English -yf English -ive English ameliorative From ameliorate + -ive.

Meanings

1. Able to repair or ameliorate.
   • One night while he was moaning on about his sorry existence I said: Do you really want to change it? Of course I do, he said, but nothing I’ve tried has been ameliorative. 2007, Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Faber and Faber (2009), page 175:
2. Suggesting or relating to a positive or approving evaluation.
   • […]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[…] 2016, Olga Panić Kavgić, “Linguistic Creativity at Work: Nicknames of Women Tennis Players”, in English Studies Today, archived from the original on 20 Aug 2018:
3. 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 project
   • ameliorative inquiry
   • ameliorative analysis

Forms

Antonyms

antonym(s) of

Deriveds

ameliorative waste

Hypernyms

evaluative (positive evaluation)

Relateds

amelioration

Translations (11)

de ameliorativ ((philosophy)) · pl amelioracyjny (able to repair or ameliorate) · fi parantuva (able to repair or ameliorate) · de bessernd (able to repair or ameliorate) · de verbessernd (able to repair or ameliorate) · fi amelioratiivinen ((philosophy)) · fi korjautuva (able to repair or ameliorate) · pl polepszający (able to repair or ameliorate) · fi parantava (able to repair or ameliorate) · pl amelioracyjny ((philosophy)) · fi korjaava (able to repair or ameliorate)

ameliorative en · NOUN

Pronunciation

• /əˈmiːliəɹətɪv/ (UK, US)
• (General-American) audio

Etymology

Etymology tree English ameliorate Latin -īvus Old French -ifbor. Middle English -yf English -ive English ameliorative From ameliorate + -ive.

Meanings

1. That which betters or improves.
   • 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. 1944, Charles Smith, An Economic Plan for Democracy, page 3:
   • With such conventional Keynesian amelioratives, the economy normally recovers with output and employment on the rise, and, unfortunately, with inflation picking up too. 1973, Alan Gartner, Public service employment, page 106:
2. (rare) A linguistic unit (such as a word, morpheme) that implies a positive or approving evaluation.
   • Moreover, diminutives, augmentatives, pejoratives and amelioratives have always been analysed as independent categories, neglecting the possible interrelations among them. 2015, Nicola Grandi, Edinburgh Handbook of Evaluative Morphology, page 4:

Forms

Antonyms

pejorative