Word.ws English Dictionary

observative

observative adjective: observant; watchful.

Adjective

observative (comparative more observative, superlative most observative)

  1. observant; watchful
    • Taking the cue from the depth and intensity of her terse poems, numbering 1775 (composed during four decades but except seven, all unpublished, during her lifetime) one feels she was engaged in a sort of poetic sadhana; she is curiously observative of the life around her and is concerned with...1983, Littcrit - Issues 16-17, page 41
    • That street life/compact city perspective is common to all the observative authors, therefore embedding the compact city concept of formal quality both in the selection of relevant formal components and in the definition of criteria for their quantitative measurement.2003, Rodney Tolley, Sustainable Transport, page 112
  2. Pertaining to observation.
    • A Habit may often raise the common conceptive sensations to the same degree of vividness as the observative, and even to a degree still higher.1830, Frederick Clissold, Practical Hints for the Development of the Human Mind, page 9
    • Some again have pointed it out as an involution of the argument, that they first divide wisdom into observative and active, one of which is identical with the science of morals, which comprises four virtues, of which the aforesead wisdom is one; so that wisdom would here be a division of itself.1839, “Muhammadan Ethics”, in Asiatic Journal and Monthly Register for British and Foreign India, China, and Australasia, volume 30, number 117, page 21
  3. Pertaining to an observative (utterance about an observation).
    • Nevertheless, even Quine, one of the strongest enemies of the distinction between observation and theory, maintains that it is possible to characterise observative sentences.2000, Claudio Garola, Arcangelo Rossi, The Foundations Of Quantum Mechanics
    • As the examples in (653) illustrate, this does not only involve utterances that may be understood as answers to questions (cf. (653a)), but also short observative statements as the ones in (653b), that occurred in a picture description.2011, Knut J. Olawsky, A Grammar of Urarina, page 443

Noun

observative (plural observatives)

  1. An observation.
    • Taking these observations as a basis for his experiments, Westphalen tried placing patients with habitual constipation on the regular peasant diet, with marked substantiation of the original hypothesis deduced from his general observatives, that the vegetable diet serves as a marked stimulus to...1904, Massachusetts Medical Society, Medical Communications - Volume 19, page 536
    • The observatives on which the totality of our empirical knowledge rests are themselves the result of the transformation of perceptual habits through initiation into the discursive community.2015, Carl B Sachs, Intentionality and the Myths of the Given, page 146
  2. An utterance that describes or calls attention to something that the speaker observes.
    • Now consider an observative that does not immediately raise the problem of ellipsis: "Willard is on the mat!" Unlike "Lo, a rabbit!," or even just "A rabbit!," this observative utterance takes the form of a proposition that can function as a purely declaratival expression.2009, Rebecca Kukla, Mark Lance, Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
    • Yet, Kukla and Lance notice, the entitlement to an observative is essentially agent-relative and expresses an unsharable perceptual state, for of course no one else can be entitled to such an expression but the one who actually is in that state.2017, Giacomo Turbanti, Robert Brandom's Normative Inferentialism, page 55

Examples of observative in a sentence

  • As early as 1842, he had referred to what he called his 'observative mood' and the search for a vantage point from which the city could be contemplated as a vast, rushing spectacle.2021, Rafael Bernabe, Walt Whitman and His Caribbean Interlocutors, page 19:
  • They urge the existence of 'observatives' as specific speech acts that are conceptual, but not necessarily propositional.2014, J. Peregrin, Inferentialism: Why Rules Matter:
  • PARISIAN TEENAGE WRITER: "I am writing a book about the Paris Riots and Student Revolution in 1968 and need some personal observatives.”2022, Andrew J. Farrara, The Modern Divine Comedy Book 8:

Forms of observative

Adjective
comparativemore observative
superlativemost observative
Noun
pluralobservatives

Questions about observative

What does observative mean?
Observative means observant; watchful.
How do you use observative in a sentence?
As early as 1842, he had referred to what he called his 'observative mood' and the search for a vantage point from which the city could be contemplated as a vast, rushing spectacle.
What part of speech is observative?
Observative can be an adjective or a noun.

Words near observative in the dictionary

  1. observationalists
  2. observationality
  3. observationally
  4. observationally stable
  5. observations
  6. observative
  7. observatives
  8. observator
  9. observatoria
  10. observatorial
  11. observatories

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: observative (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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