Word.ws English Dictionary

impf

impf is the abbreviation of imperfect.

impf is the abbreviation of imperfective.

Meaning of imperfect

Adjective

imperfect (comparative more imperfect, superlative most imperfect)

  1. Not perfect.
    • Why, then, your other senses grow imperfect.c. 1603–1606, William Shakespeare, “The Tragedie of King Lear”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount...
  2. Unisexual: having either male (with stamens) or female (with pistil) flowers, but not with both.
    Antonyms:
    perfect
  3. Known or expected to be polyphyletic, as of a form taxon.
  4. Representing a continuing or repeated action.
  5. (obsolete) Lacking some elementary organ that is essential to successful or normal activity.
    • When the prophet Joel was describing the formidable accidents in the day of the Lord's judgment, and the fearful sentence of an angry Judge, he was not able to express it, but stammered like a child, or an amazed, imperfect person.1653, “Twenty-five Sermons Preached at Golden Grove; Being for the Winter Half-year, […]: Sermon III. [Doomsday Book; or, Christ’s Advent to Judgment.] Part III.”, in Reginald Heber, editor, The...

See all 8 meanings of imperfect

Meaning of imperfective

Adjective

imperfective (not comparable)

  1. Of, relating to or having the properties of the imperfective aspect.
    • In the last chapter, we observed the rise of an imperfective marker in English, the Progressive, as the dominant and surviving member of a wider paradigm of imperfective aspectual functions in Old English, but which were no longer marked in the same way in later stages of the history of English.2006, Debra Ziegeler, Interfaces with English Aspect: Diachronic and Empirical Studies, John Benjamins Publishing Company, page 89

See all 2 meanings of imperfective

Questions about impf

What is impf the abbreviation of?
Impf is the abbreviation of imperfect.

Words near impf in the dictionary

  1. Impeyan monal
  2. Impeyan monals
  3. Impeyan pheasant
  4. Impeyan pheasants
  5. Impeys
  6. impf
  7. Imphal
  8. Imphal East
  9. Imphal West
  10. Imphalite
  11. Imphalites

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: impf (page history and authors); imperfect (page history and authors); imperfective (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: “impf.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/impf. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.