expressive
/ɪkˈspɹɛsɪv/
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 3.43 in modern English
22
Scrabble Score
10
Letters
3
Syllables
7
Unique Chars
Meaning
adj
adj
Conveying the speaker's emotions and/or attitudes, in addition to the denotative or literal meaning.
adj
Able to represent a number of ideas or concepts.
noun
Any word or phrase that expresses (that the speaker, writer, or signer has) a certain attitude toward or information about the referent.
noun
A word or phrase, belonging to a distinct word class or having distinct morphosyntactic properties, with semantic symbolism (for example, an onomatopoeia), variously considered either a synonym, a hypernym or a hyponym of ideophone.
Example Sentences
- "expressive dancing"
- "a gesture expressive of the utmost contempt"
- "These adults performed significantly more poorly than a group of 28 control adults on all measures of articulation and expressive and receptive language."
- "This volume provides a detailed account of the syntax of expressive language, that is, utterances that express, rather than describe, the emotions and attitudes of the speaker."
- "A programming language that is Turing complete is more expressive than one that is not."
- "Consider the case of expressives, where no prior knowledge of the speaker’s attitudes are required to interpret the utterance. In (43) ["That jerk Alexa keeps making me look bad"], Steve does not need to know (and in fact has no prior knowledge of) anything relating to Siri’s attitudes towards Alexa to interpret that Siri has a negative attitude about Alexa. It is the expressive that jerk that implies the negative attitude."
Etymology
From Middle French expressif.
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /ɪkˈspɹɛsɪv/
- British English: /ɪkˈspɹɛsɪv/