Dictionary

putative en · ADJ

Pronunciation

• /ˈpjʉː.tə.tɪv/ (Australia)
• /ˈpju.tə.tɪv/ (General-American)
• (Southern-England) audio
• /ˈpjuː.tə.tɪv/ (Received-Pronunciation)

Etymology

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

Meanings

1. Commonly believed or deemed to be the case; generally assumed.
   • If they are in fact sound, then, of course, desire-utilitarianism need not account for the putative wrongness of infanticide. 1991 May 24, Clement Dore, Moral Scepticism, Springer, →ISBN, page 85:
   • Just as Prince Sihanouk is fronting for the Khmer Rouge today . . . so also was he their putative leader from 1970 to 1975. 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)
   • 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. 2017 January 10, Jonathan Buchsbaum, Exception Taken: How France Has Defied Hollywood's New World Order, Columbia University Press, →ISBN, page 107:
   • 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. 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:
2. Accepted by supposition rather than as a result of proof.
   • In answer to the objection, that if a thing is only putative, it is fictitious 1831, The Quarterly Christian Spectator, page 504:
   • 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. 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:
   • [T]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. 1879 November 9, Maurice Mauris, “A Materialistic Artist”, in New York Times, page 10:
   • You have the putative assumption, because everybody is interrogated, that everybody who has entered is heterosexual. 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:
   • 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. 2016 May 23, Max Deutscher, In Sensible Judgement, Routledge, →ISBN, page 99:
   • 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. 2023 December 22, Anja Geitmann, Plant Cell Walls: Research Milestones and Conceptual Insights, CRC Press, →ISBN:
3. Alleged, purported, ostensible, professed.
   • 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. 2006 August 18, Unmesh Kher, “No Neat Endings for the JonBenet Case”, in Time:
   • 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. 2016 August 11, Mary Karr, “The Crotchgrabber”, in The New Yorker:
   • 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 April 1, Pål Kolstø, Strategies of Symbolic Nation-building in South Eastern Europe, Routledge, →ISBN, page 13:
   • A putative love tonic was made from the water in which myrtle leaves and flowers had been steeped. 1961, Harry E. Wedeck, Dictionary of Aphrodisiacs, New York: The Citadel Press, page 162:
4. (proscribed, sometimes) Prospective, potential, proposed.
   • 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). 2018 07, Richard Tomlinson, Marcus Spiller, Australia's Metropolitan Imperative: An Agenda for Governance Reform, CSIRO PUBLISHING, →ISBN, page 104:
   • 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. 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:
   • 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. 2004, Katherine Joslin, Jane Addams: A Writer's Life, University of Illinois Press, →ISBN, page 74:
   • 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 July 20, Samuel J Fell, Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen, John Shand, “Music reviews: John Coltrane, Bob Dylan and Catherine Britt”, in Sydney Morning Herald:
   • 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. 1981, Michael Rush, Parliamentary Government in Britain, New York : Holmes & Meier Publishers:
   • 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. 2011 November 3, P. W. Preston, England after the Great Recession: Tracking the Political and Cultural Consequences of the Crisis, Springer, →ISBN, page 70:
   • 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. 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:
   • 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. 2009 October 1, Christian Wolmar, Fire and Steam: A New History of the Railways in Britain, Atlantic Books Ltd, →ISBN:

Forms

Deriveds

putativeness · putative marriage · putatively

Relateds

disrepute · dispute · impute · repute

Synonyms

reputed · supposed

Translations (54)

es putativo (commonly believed or deemed to be the case) · tr varsayımsal (commonly believed or deemed to be the case) · uk припусти́мий (commonly believed or deemed to be the case) · ja 推定 (commonly believed or deemed to be the case) · bg мним (commonly believed or deemed to be the case) · hu feltételezett (commonly believed or deemed to be the case) · de vermeintlich (commonly believed or deemed to be the case) · mk наводен (commonly believed or deemed to be the case) · cmn 假定的 (commonly believed or deemed to be the case) · nl vermoedelijk (commonly believed or deemed to be the case) · es existimativo (commonly believed or deemed to be the case) · fr présumé (commonly believed or deemed to be the case) · sv förment (commonly believed or deemed to be the case) · hu vélt (commonly believed or deemed to be the case) · is meintur (commonly believed or deemed to be the case) · ru мни́мый (commonly believed or deemed to be the case) · no formentlig (commonly believed or deemed to be the case) · uk га́даний (commonly believed or deemed to be the case) · sh vjȅrojātan (commonly believed or deemed to be the case) · el υποτιθέμενος (commonly believed or deemed to be the case) · fi oletettu (commonly believed or deemed to be the case) · sv förmodad (commonly believed or deemed to be the case) · it putativo (commonly believed or deemed to be the case) · et arvatav (commonly believed or deemed to be the case) · cs putativní (commonly believed or deemed to be the case) · bg предполагаем (commonly believed or deemed to be the case) · pt putativo (commonly believed or deemed to be the case) · el φερόμενος (commonly believed or deemed to be the case) · hy ենթադրյալ (commonly believed or deemed to be the case) · pl przypuszczalny (commonly believed or deemed to be the case) · mk претпоставен (commonly believed or deemed to be the case) · et oletatav (commonly believed or deemed to be the case) · no formodet (commonly believed or deemed to be the case) · sh вје̏роја̄тан (commonly believed or deemed to be the case) · nl zogenaamd (commonly believed or deemed to be the case) · ru вероя́тный (commonly believed or deemed to be the case) · cs domnělý (commonly believed or deemed to be the case) · sh наводан (commonly believed or deemed to be the case) · tr varsayılan (commonly believed or deemed to be the case) · de mutmaßlich (commonly believed or deemed to be the case) · no antatt (commonly believed or deemed to be the case) · sh pretpòstavljen (commonly believed or deemed to be the case) · fr putatif (commonly believed or deemed to be the case) · de angeblich (commonly believed or deemed to be the case) · tr farz edilen (commonly believed or deemed to be the case) · ca putatiu (commonly believed or deemed to be the case) · ar مُفْتَرَض (commonly believed or deemed to be the case) · hu vélelmezett (commonly believed or deemed to be the case) · ru предположи́тельный (commonly believed or deemed to be the case) · nl vermeend (commonly believed or deemed to be the case) · sh navodan (commonly believed or deemed to be the case) · pl domniemany (commonly believed or deemed to be the case) · sh претпо̀стављен (commonly believed or deemed to be the case) · cmn 推定的 (commonly believed or deemed to be the case)