indicative
US/ɪnˈdɪk.ə.tɪv/
indicative adjective: serving as a sign, indication or suggestion of something.
Adjective
indicative (comparative more indicative, superlative most indicative)
- Serving as a sign, indication or suggestion of something.
- He had pains indicative of a heart attack.
- Although it may be convenient within the case study publication format to cover the topic of pseudopathology in the discussion of differential diagnosis, this is not indicative of how this stage of work slots into the diagnostic process in the laboratory.2023, Simon Mays, “The Macroscopic Study of Human Skeletal Paleopathology” (chapter 2), in The Routledge Handbook of Paleopathology, Routledge, →DOI, →ISBN, page 29
- Of, or relating to the indicative mood.
Noun
indicative (countable and uncountable, plural indicatives)
- The indicative mood.
- A term in the indicative mood.
- The fact that imperative forms were taken into English as indicatives suggests that the English speakers using the Hindustani verbs were most familiar (in some cases perhaps only familiar) with the imperative form.2018, James Lambert, “Anglo-Indian slang in dictionaries on historical principles”, in World Englishes, volume 37, page 253
indicative meaning in Bengali, Telugu, Malayalam and Kannada
indicative in Bengali
- indicative
- পরিচায়ক poricaẏok
indicative in Telugu
- సూచించేది
indicative in Malayalam
- expressive, symptomatic, suggestive
- സൂചിപ്പിക്കുന്ന, ചൂണ്ടിക്കാണിക്കുന്ന, ലാക്ഷണിക, വ്യഞ്ജക, സൂചകം, സൂചക
indicative in Kannada
- ಸೂಚಿಸುವಂತಿದೆ, ಸೂಚಿಸುವಂಥದ್ದು
More languagesFewer languages
- indicative in Tagalog
- paturol
- indicative in Persian
- گزارشی gozâreši
Examples of indicative in a sentence
- He applied a gram positive stain, looking for rods indicative of Listeria.
- The patient had a crop of bumps indicative of chicken pox.
- The mood most frequently encountered in English is the indicative, of which the mood in this sentence is an example.
Forms of indicative
| Adjective | |
|---|---|
| comparative | more indicative |
| superlative | most indicative |
| alternative abbreviation | ind. |
| Noun | |
| plural | indicatives |
Origin of indicative
From Middle French indicatif, from Late Latin indicātīvus. By surface analysis, indicate + -ive.
Words formed from indicative
Phrases with indicative
Questions about indicative
- What does indicative mean?
- Indicative means serving as a sign, indication or suggestion of something.
- What is indicative in Bengali?
- Indicative in Bengali is পরিচায়ক (poricaẏok). See Indicative meaning in Bengali.
- What part of speech is indicative?
- Indicative can be an adjective or a noun.
- How do you pronounce indicative?
- Indicative is pronounced /ɪnˈdɪk.ə.tɪv/ (US).
Words near indicative in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: indicative (page history and authors); পরিচায়ক (Bengali) (page history and authors); indicative (Telugu, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); indicative (Olam, E.K. Kurup corpus) (dataset and license); indicative (Kannada, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license). 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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-indicative.wav.
Cite this entry: “indicative.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/indicative. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.