Word.ws English Dictionary

nominative

/ˈnɒm(ɪ)nətɪv/US/ˈnɑm(ɪ)nətɪv/

nominative adjective: giving a name; naming; designating.

Adjective

nominative (not comparable)

  1. Giving a name; naming; designating.
    • nominative fair use
    • A telling marker of the change in the reporter's status was the elimination of the nominative reports (that is, the citation of the reports by the reporter's name). The first state to use “state reports” rather than the nominative designation was Connecticut (1814). Many other states made this...2007, William D. Popkin, Evolution of the Judicial Opinion: Institutional and Individual Styles, NYU Press, →ISBN, page 104
  2. Being in that case or form of a noun which stands as the subject of a finite verb.
  3. Making a selection or nomination; choosing.
    • To Duchamp, an artist's nominative act—the declaration itself regardless of the object—was itself the art. He could choose anything indifferent to, or even in spite of, its aesthetic merits.2014, Eva Diaz, The Experimenters: Chance and Design at Black Mountain College

Noun

nominative (plural nominatives)

  1. The nominative case.
  2. A noun in the nominative case.

nominative meaning in Urdu, Gujarati and Arabic

nominative in Urdu

فاعل, نامزدہ

nominative in Gujarati

nominative
પ્રથમા prathmā

nominative in Arabic

being in the nominative case
مَرْفُوع marfūʕ

Examples of nominative in a sentence

  • The grammatical cases nominative and accusative are used for subject resp. direct object in many languages, including Latin.
  • Nominative determinism is usually applied to the idea that someone's name may influence their future.
  • Gerunds and gerund phrases are always nouns, so they are always predicate nominatives when used as complements.

All 13 example sentences with nominative

Forms of nominative

pluralnominatives

Origin of nominative

From Middle English nominatyf, either via Old French nominatif or directly from Latin nōminātīvus (“pertaining to naming, nominative”).

Words formed from nominative

Phrases with nominative

Questions about nominative

What does nominative mean?
Nominative means giving a name; naming; designating.
What is nominative in Urdu?
Nominative in Urdu is فاعل, نامزدہ. See Nominative meaning in Urdu.
What part of speech is nominative?
Nominative can be an adjective or a noun.
How do you pronounce nominative?
Nominative is pronounced /ˈnɑm(ɪ)nətɪv/ (US).

Words near nominative in the dictionary

  1. nomination boroughs
  2. nomination game
  3. nomination games
  4. nominations
  5. nominatival
  6. nominative
  7. nominative absolute
  8. nominative absolutes
  9. nominative case
  10. nominative cases
  11. nominative determinism

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: nominative (page history and authors); nominative (Urdu Wiktionary) (page history and authors); પ્રથમા (Gujarati) (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-nominative.wav.

Cite this entry: “nominative.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/nominative. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.