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inchoative

/ɪnˈkəʊ.ə.tɪv/US/ɪnˈkoʊətɪv/

inchoative adjective: initial; as yet unformed; inchoate.

Adjective

inchoative (not comparable)

  1. Initial; as yet unformed; inchoate.
    • [T]he day-Star […] ſhall be riſen in our hearts; vvhereof theſe acts of our intellect ſeem to be ſome inchoative or imperfect rays, […]1648, Walter Montagu, “The One and Twentieth Treatise. Of the Preheminences of a True Contemplative Life. §. I. Contemplation Defined, and Some Excellencies thereof Discoursed.”, in Miscellanea...
    • Our first Piece is of Winter, or late Autumn, 1771,—while the solution of the Polish Business is still in its inchoative stages; …1858–1865, Thomas Carlyle, History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Called Frederick the Great, volume (please specify |volume=I to VI), London: Chapman and Hall, […], →OCLC
  2. Aspectually indicating that a state is about to be entered or is in the process of being entered.
    • The inchoative (inceptive) aspect of a verb expresses the beginning of an action. Example: He is beginning to crawl.1974, Floyd L. Moreland, Rita M. Fleischer, Latin: An Intensive Course, University of California Press, page 12
  3. In Catalan, being a member of a class of third-conjugation verbs (e.g. servir) in which a syllable -eix- (or otherwise depending on dialect), derived from the Latin inchoative but now without meaning, is inserted into certain conjugations (e.g. serveixo).

Noun

inchoative (plural inchoatives)

  1. An inchoative construction.

Forms of inchoative

pluralinchoatives

Origin of inchoative

Borrowed from Latin inchoātīvus, formed by metathesis from incohātīvus, from incohō (“to begin”). Compare French inchoatif.

Words formed from inchoative

Questions about inchoative

What does inchoative mean?
Inchoative means initial; as yet unformed; inchoate.
What part of speech is inchoative?
Inchoative can be an adjective or a noun.
How do you pronounce inchoative?
Inchoative is pronounced /ɪnˈkəʊ.ə.tɪv/ (UK).

Words near inchoative in the dictionary

  1. inchoatenesses
  2. inchoates
  3. inchoating
  4. inchoation
  5. inchoations
  6. inchoative
  7. inchoatively
  8. inchoativeness
  9. inchoatives
  10. inchoativity
  11. Inchon

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: inchoative (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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