costive
/ˈkɑstɪv/
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 0.00 in modern English
12
Scrabble Score
7
Letters
2
Syllables
7
Unique Chars
Meaning
adj
Example Sentences
- "When I was mortall, this my costiue corps / Did lap vp Figs and Raisons in the Strand, / Where sitting I espi'd a louely Dame, / Whose maister wrought with Lingell and with All, / And vnder ground he vampied many a boote."
- "Is it fit——goodnatured man! thou should’st sit up, with the wound upon thy groin, whole nights baking thy blood with hectic watchings?——Alas! ’twill exasperate thy symptoms,—check thy perspirations—evaporate thy spirits—waste thy animal strength, dry up thy radical moisture, bring thee into a costive habit of body,——impair thy health,——and hasten all the infirmities of thy old age.—O my uncle! my uncle Toby."
- "Melanie, who was used to Wani's costive memos, and even to dressing up the gist of a letter in her own words, stuck out her tongue in concentration as she took down Nick's old-fashioned periods and perplexing semicolons."
- "Well, the shoemaker and his wife, Louise, may have been poor, needy, indigent, destitute, impecunious and impoverished — at least before the elves came along — but they had never been parsimonious, costive, miserly, penny-pinching or stinting. They were far from being avaricious, rapacious, mean or greedy. The shoemaker was uxorious about his wife, Louise, but he had never been usurious, even when he had money to lend […]"
- "For quotations using this term, see Citations:costive."
Etymology
From Middle French costivé, past participle of costiver (“to constipate”), ultimately from Latin cōnstīpātus (“constipated”). Doublet of constipate.
Origin
Word Breakdown
- Root: costivé
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /ˈkɑstɪv/
- British English: /ˈkɒstɪv/
Usage
Inflected Forms
more costive (comparative)
most costive (superlative)