factive
factive adjective: licensing only those content clauses that represent claims that are (known or believed with certainty to be) true.
Adjective (1)
factive (not comparable)
- Licensing only those content clauses that represent claims that are (known or believed with certainty to be) true.
- Under this account, verbs like forget and remember are classified as factive (1) and verbs like think and believe as nonfactive (2).2003, Petra Schulz, Factivity: Its Nature and Acquisition, de Gruyter, →ISBN, page 2
- Antonyms:
- nonfactive, contrafactive
- Which does not know any falsities: which knows only truths.
Noun (1)
factive (plural factives)
- A factive verb.
Adjective (2)
factive (not comparable)
Noun (2)
factive (plural factives)
- A fictive taking its source from a physical person rather than a fictional work.
Antonyms of factive
Forms of factive
| plural | factives |
|---|
Origin of factive
From fact + -ive.
From New Latin factīvus, from Latin facere (“to make”).
Blend of fact + fictive
Words formed from factive
Words that rhyme with factive
- active
- inactive
- reactive
- attractive
- extractive
- protractive
- abstractive
- hyperactive
- interactive
- radioactive
- subtractive
- unattractive
14 more rhymesFewer rhymes
Questions about factive
- What does factive mean?
- Factive means licensing only those content clauses that represent claims that are (known or believed with certainty to be) true.
- What part of speech is factive?
- Factive can be an adjective or a noun.
Words near factive in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: factive (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: “factive.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/factive. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.