Word.ws English Dictionary

exonerative

exonerative adjective: exonerating; tending to exonerate.

Adjective

exonerative (comparative more exonerative, superlative most exonerative)

  1. exonerating; tending to exonerate.
    • Journalist Radley Balko has coined the term “exonerative tense” for […] language structures [specifically designed to diminish the central, active role of police officers in the killings] to highlight their apparent aim of dampening negative judgments about the appropriateness of the officers’...2025 January 24, Jonathan Moreno-Medina, Aurelie Ouss, Patrick Bayer, Bocar A. Ba, “Officer-Involved: The Media Language of Police Killings”, in The Quarterly Journal of Economics, →DOI

Synonyms of exonerative

Forms of exonerative

comparativemore exonerative
superlativemost exonerative

Origin of exonerative

From exonerate + -ive.

Words formed from exonerative

Questions about exonerative

What does exonerative mean?
Exonerative means exonerating; tending to exonerate.
What part of speech is exonerative?
Exonerative is an adjective.

Words near exonerative in the dictionary

  1. exonerates
  2. exonerateth
  3. exonerating
  4. exoneration
  5. exonerations
  6. exonerative
  7. exonerator
  8. exonerators
  9. exoneree
  10. exonerees
  11. Exonian

Source and license

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