Word.ws English Dictionary

irritative

irritative adjective: serving to excite or irritate.

Adjective

irritative (comparative more irritative, superlative most irritative)

  1. serving to excite or irritate
    • an irritative agent
  2. accompanied with, or produced by, increased action or irritation
    • an irritative fever
    • For the irritative ideas of the apparent motions of objects are now excited by irritation from internal stimulus1794–1796, Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomia; or, The Laws of Organic Life, volume (please specify |volume=I or II), London: […] J[oseph] Johnson, […], →OCLC

Noun

irritative (plural irritatives)

  1. Any substance causing irritation; an irritant.

Forms of irritative

Adjective
comparativemore irritative
superlativemost irritative
Noun
pluralirritatives

Origin of irritative

From irritate + -ive.

Words formed from irritative

Questions about irritative

What does irritative mean?
Irritative means serving to excite or irritate.
What part of speech is irritative?
Irritative can be an adjective or a noun.

Words near irritative in the dictionary

  1. irritatingly
  2. irritatingness
  3. irritation
  4. irritational
  5. irritations
  6. irritative
  7. irritativeness
  8. irritatives
  9. irritator
  10. irritators
  11. irritatory

Source and license

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