Word.ws English Dictionary

ameliorative

UK/əˈmiːliəɹətɪv/

ameliorative adjective: able to repair or ameliorate.

Adjective

ameliorative (comparative more ameliorative, superlative most ameliorative)

  1. Able to repair or ameliorate.
    • One night while he was moaning on about his sorry existence I said: Do you really want to change it?
      Of course I do, he said, but nothing I’ve tried has been ameliorative.2007, Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Faber and Faber (2009), page 175
  2. Suggesting or relating to a positive or approving evaluation.
    • […]personal nicknames can generally be divided into positively marked (ameliorative) ones, usually given by family members and friends as a sign of affection and acceptance, and those negatively marked (pejorative or derogatory), whose aim is to mock or ridicule a person[…]2016, Olga Panić Kavgić, “Linguistic Creativity at Work: Nicknames of Women Tennis Players”, in English Studies Today, archived from the original on 20 Aug 2018
  3. Of or relating to conceptual engineering, the normative study of which conceptual demarcation is most conducive to solve the problems the concept is a priori taken to solve.
    • ameliorative inquiry
    • ameliorative analysis

Noun

ameliorative (plural amelioratives)

  1. That which betters or improves.
    • With such conventional Keynesian amelioratives, the economy normally recovers with output and employment on the rise, and, unfortunately, with inflation picking up too.1973, Alan Gartner, Public service employment, page 106
    • It certainly means the stripping from Parliament of endless debates on niggling parsimonies and trivial amelioratives; the thousand and one unreal fights and distractions which has kept democracy from winning the other half of freedom.1944, Charles Smith, An Economic Plan for Democracy, page 3
  2. (rare) A linguistic unit (such as a word, morpheme) that implies a positive or approving evaluation.
    • Moreover, diminutives, augmentatives, pejoratives and amelioratives have always been analysed as independent categories, neglecting the possible interrelations among them.2015, Nicola Grandi, Edinburgh Handbook of Evaluative Morphology, page 4
    Antonyms:
    pejorative

ameliorative meaning in Urdu

ameliorative in Urdu

اِصلاحی, رَفاہی, افاقَہ بَخش, افاقَہ پَذیر

Antonyms of ameliorative

Forms of ameliorative

Adjective
comparativemore ameliorative
superlativemost ameliorative
Noun
pluralamelioratives

Origin of ameliorative

From ameliorate + -ive.

Words formed from ameliorative

Questions about ameliorative

What does ameliorative mean?
Ameliorative means able to repair or ameliorate.
What is ameliorative in Urdu?
Ameliorative in Urdu is اِصلاحی, رَفاہی, افاقَہ بَخش. See Ameliorative meaning in Urdu.
What part of speech is ameliorative?
Ameliorative can be an adjective or a noun.
How do you pronounce ameliorative?
Ameliorative is pronounced /əˈmiːliəɹətɪv/ (UK).

Words near ameliorative in the dictionary

  1. ameliorating
  2. amelioratingly
  3. amelioration
  4. ameliorationist
  5. ameliorations
  6. ameliorative
  7. ameliorative waste
  8. amelioratives
  9. ameliorator
  10. ameliorators
  11. amelioratory

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: ameliorative (page history and authors); ameliorative (Urdu Wiktionary) (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Naomi Persephone Amethyst (NaomiAmethyst)-ameliorative.wav.

Cite this entry: “ameliorative.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/ameliorative. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.