English Explanatory Dictionary

expressive

English dictionary entry

Meanings

adj
  1. Effectively conveying thought or feeling.
  2. Conveying the speaker's emotions and/or attitudes, in addition to the denotative or literal meaning.
  3. Able to represent a number of ideas or concepts.
noun
  1. Any word or phrase that expresses (that the speaker, writer, or signer has) a certain attitude toward or information about the referent.
  2. 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.

Pronunciation

/ɪkˈspɹɛsɪv/ /ɛkˈspɹɛsɪv/ /ɛkˈspɹæsɛv/ en-us-expressive.ogg /ɪkˈspɹesɪv/ /əkˈspɹesəv/

Word forms

expressive more expressive most expressive expressives

Etymology

From Middle French expressif.

Synonyms

sound-symbolic

Antonyms

inexpressive unexpressive

Related words

expressivity

Derived words

antiexpressive expressive aphasia expressive language expressively expressiveness expressivism expressivist misexpressive nonexpressive superexpressive
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