Word.ws English Dictionary

complaintive

complaintive adjective: tending to complain, characterized by complaining.

Adjective

complaintive (comparative more complaintive, superlative most complaintive)

  1. Tending to complain, characterized by complaining.
    • The winding streams and hanging hills repeat / Loud groans from ev'ry herd, from ev'ry fold / Complaintive murmurs; heaps on heaps they fall, / There where they fall they lie, corrupt and rot.1806, Richard Cumberland, Memoirs of Richard Cumberland: Containing an Account of His Life and Writings
    • On the Chroncicle Careers website, as well as other mainstream university education publications, I've read articles - some complaintive, some pleased - about how college education nowadays is so 'client-based'.1992, Elwood Watson, Overcoming Adversity in Academia: Stories from Generation X Faculty

Forms of complaintive

comparativemore complaintive
superlativemost complaintive

Origin of complaintive

From complaint + -ive.

Words formed from complaintive

Questions about complaintive

What does complaintive mean?
Complaintive means tending to complain, characterized by complaining.
What part of speech is complaintive?
Complaintive is an adjective.

Words near complaintive in the dictionary

  1. complainingness
  2. complainings
  3. complains
  4. complaint
  5. complaintful
  6. complaintive
  7. complaintiveness
  8. complaintless
  9. complaints
  10. complainy
  11. complaisance

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: complaintive (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.

Last updated:

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