Word.ws English Dictionary

despective

despective adjective: disparaging, derogatory; looking down upon.

Adjective

despective (comparative more despective, superlative most despective)

  1. Disparaging, derogatory; looking down upon.
    • ‘Pencil pusher’ is a despective term for ‘administrative clerk’.

Noun

despective (plural despectives)

  1. A disparaging/derogatory word or form of a word; a word or form indicative of the speaker's tendency to look down on the referent.

Forms of despective

Adjective
comparativemore despective
superlativemost despective
Noun
pluraldespectives

Origin of despective

From despect + -ive.

Questions about despective

What does despective mean?
Despective means disparaging, derogatory; looking down upon.
What part of speech is despective?
Despective can be an adjective or a noun.

Words near despective in the dictionary

  1. despeckling
  2. despect
  3. despected
  4. despecting
  5. despection
  6. despective
  7. despectives
  8. despects
  9. desped
  10. despedida
  11. despedida parties

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: despective (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: “despective.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/despective. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.