Word.ws English Dictionary

evitative

evitative adjective: grammatically expressing the notion that something is avoided or feared: a grammatical mood found in some Australian Aboriginal languages.

Adjective

evitative (not comparable)

  1. grammatically expressing the notion that something is avoided or feared: a grammatical mood found in some Australian Aboriginal languages.
    • The non-past non-evitative potential corresponds both to the English indicative future and to all imperatives (including jussive and hortatory imperatives); the evitative is used to mark future events that are feared or to be avoided , and corresponds to English "lest..." constructions, except that...1986, Language, Linguistic Society of America
    Synonyms:
    aversive

Synonyms of evitative

Origin of evitative

From Latin ēvītāre (“to avoid”), from ē- (“out”) + vītāre (“to shun”).

Words formed from evitative

Phrases with evitative

Questions about evitative

What does evitative mean?
Evitative means grammatically expressing the notion that something is avoided or feared: a grammatical mood found in some Australian Aboriginal languages.
What part of speech is evitative?
Evitative is an adjective.

Words near evitative in the dictionary

  1. evitated
  2. evitates
  3. evitating
  4. evitation
  5. evitations
  6. evitative
  7. evitative case
  8. evitative cases
  9. evite
  10. evited
  11. eviternal

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: evitative (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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