intensive
Meanings
- Done with intensity or to a great degree; thorough.
- Being made more intense.
- Making something more intense; intensifying.
- Of agriculture: increasing the productivity of an area of land.
- Of a word: serving to give emphasis or force.
- Involving much activity in a short period of time; highly concentrated.
- Of or pertaining to innate or internal intensity or strength rather than outward extent.
- Chiefly suffixed to a noun: using something with intensity; requiring a great amount of something; demanding.
- Chiefly in intensive care: of care or treatment: involving a great degree of life support, monitoring, and other forms of effort in order to manage life-threatening conditions.
- That can be intensified; allowing an increase of degree.
- Synonym of intense (“extreme or very high or strong in degree; of feelings, thoughts, etc.: strongly focused”).
- A thing which makes something more intense; specifically (linguistics), a form of a word with a more forceful or stronger sense than the root on which it is built.
- A course taught intensively, involving much activity in a short period of time.
Pronunciation
Word forms
Etymology
The adjective is derived from Late Middle English intensive (“fervent, great, intense”), borrowed from Old French intensif, intensive (modern French intensif) + Middle English -ive (suffix meaning ‘of the nature of, relating to’ forming adjectives), equivalent to intense + -ive. Intensif is from Medieval Latin intēnsīvus, from Latin intēnsus (“attentive; eager, intent; intensive”) + -īvus (suffix forming adjectives with the sense ‘doing; related to doing’); and intēnsus is the perfect passive participle of intendō (“to stretch out, strain”), from in- (prefix meaning ‘to, towards’) + tendō (“to extend, stretch, stretch out”) (ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *tend- (“to extend, stretch”)). Doublet of intend. The noun is derived from the adjective.