Word.ws English Dictionary

postformative

postformative noun: a formative element at the end.

Noun

postformative (plural postformatives)

  1. A formative element at the end.

Adjective

postformative (not comparable)

  1. Forming or affecting something that comes before.
    • The phenomenon of Berber verbs which are marked for person with both a preformative and a postformative affix […] finds a formally exact pendant in Canaanite, where there is one occurrence of the phenomenon in the Bible (Is 63:3 [אגאלתי]), but c. 20 occurrences in the Amarna tablets.1981, Otto Rössler, “The Structure and Inflexion of the Verb in the Semito-Hamitic Languages: Preliminary Studies for a Comparative Semito-Hamitic Grammar”, in Bono Homini Donum: Essays in Historical...
  2. Occurring after the formation (chiefly written post-formative, said in Islamic studies of the period following the Golden Age of Islam 786–861 CE).
    • It seems that Western observers of the Near East—and, in addition, a large percentage of the intellectuals of the Islamic world—can hardly imagine a society in which a struggle for truth does not continuously rage. But such a society seems to have been the case in large parts of the Islamic world...2021, Thomas Bauer, translated by Hinrich Biesterfeldt and Tricia Tunstall, A Culture of Ambiguity: An Alternative History of Islam, New York: Columbia University Press, →ISBN, page 259, occurring...

Forms of postformative

pluralpostformatives

Origin of postformative

From post- (prefix meaning ‘after’) + formative, modelled after preformative.

Questions about postformative

What does postformative mean?
Postformative means a formative element at the end.
What part of speech is postformative?
Postformative can be a noun or an adjective.
What is the plural of postformative?
The plural of postformative is postformatives.

Words near postformative in the dictionary

  1. postformalin
  2. postformalism
  3. postformalist
  4. postformation
  5. postformational
  6. postformative
  7. postformatives
  8. postformed
  9. postforming
  10. postforms
  11. postfortification

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: postformative (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: En-us-postformative.oga.

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