Word.ws English Dictionary

nonoperative

nonoperative adjective: not requiring or involving a medical operation or surgery.

Adjective

nonoperative (not comparable)

  1. Not requiring or involving a medical operation or surgery.
    Synonyms:
    nonsurgical, medical[Appendix:Glossary
    Antonyms:
    operative, surgical
  2. Not operative, not operational; inoperative.
    • Near-synonyms: nonfunctional, nonfunctioning
    • The historical cost of the property which was estimated to become nonoperative was set forth by the Commission's engineers, in Application No. 4440, as $36,278.1921, Henry Clifford Spurr, Ellsworth Nichols, Public Utilities Reports, page 710

Noun

nonoperative (plural nonoperatives)

  1. (uncommon) One who is not an operative (“employee or worker”).
    • Practically 50 per cent of the female operatives are found in the two groups aged 15 to 19 and 20 to 24 years, while only 18.2 per cent of the female nonoperatives are found in these age groups.1916, Women in industry series, United States. Bureau of Labor Statistics, page 366
    • If they were less numerous among the nonoperatives it would be a reasonable assumption that the operative death rates were unfairly weighted by their greater relative number, and that a part at least of the operative excess was due to ...1919, Bulletin of the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, page 83

Examples of nonoperative in a sentence

  • The guide arms can rock forward into an operative position of their own or back into a nonoperative position.1996, David Kahn, The Codebreakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication from Ancient Times to the Internet, Simon and...
  • [...] proportion of nonoperatives in total employment in all British manufacturing industries from 1948 to 1962.1972, James L. Price, Handbook of Organizational Measurement:

Synonyms of nonoperative

Antonyms

All synonyms and antonyms of nonoperative

Forms of nonoperative

pluralnonoperatives

Origin of nonoperative

From non- + operative.

Questions about nonoperative

What does nonoperative mean?
Nonoperative means not requiring or involving a medical operation or surgery.
How do you use nonoperative in a sentence?
The guide arms can rock forward into an operative position of their own or back into a nonoperative position.
What part of speech is nonoperative?
Nonoperative can be an adjective or a noun.

Words near nonoperative in the dictionary

  1. nonopening
  2. nonopera
  3. nonoperatic
  4. nonoperating
  5. nonoperational
  6. nonoperative
  7. nonoperatively
  8. nonoperatives
  9. nonoperator
  10. nonoperators
  11. nonoperculate

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: nonoperative (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.

Last updated:

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