pragmatic
/pɹæɡˈmætɪk/
pragmatic adjective: practical, concerned with making decisions and actions that are useful in practice, not just theory.
Adjective
pragmatic (comparative more pragmatic, superlative most pragmatic)
- Practical, concerned with making decisions and actions that are useful in practice, not just theory.
- The sturdy furniture in the student lounge was pragmatic, but unattractive.
- Nor indeed are these restrictions pragmatic in nature: i.e. the ill-formedness of the heed-sentences in (60) is entirely different in kind from the oddity of sentences like:
(61) !That man will eat any car which thinks heʼs stupid
which is purely pragmatic (i.e. lies in the fact that (61) describes...1988, Andrew Radford, chapter 8, in Transformational grammar: a first course, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, page 423
- Synonyms:
- down-to-earth, functional, practical, utilitarian, realistic, political
- Philosophical; dealing with causes, reasons, and effects, rather than with details and circumstances; said of literature.
- Polybius’s pragmatic history is simply the history of affairs, as distinguished from the descriptive and often poetical character which much history before his time had.1854 March, J. G., “On the Dating of Ancient History”, in Journal of Classical and Sacred Philology, volume 1, page 53
- […]such objects belonged to the domain of the comic poet, and of the lighter kinds of poetry. For the more serious kinds, for pragmatic poetry, to use an excellent expression of Polybius, they were more difficult and severe in the range of subjects which they permitted.1856, Matthew Arnold, Poems, page 16
- Relating to the field of pragmatics.
- Interfering in the affairs of others; officious; meddlesome.
Noun
pragmatic (plural pragmatics)
pragmatic meaning in Hindi, Tamil, Urdu and Bengali
pragmatic in Hindi
- practical
- व्यवहारिक vyavhārik, आशावादी āśāvādī
pragmatic in Tamil
- நடைமுறைக்கேற்ற
pragmatic in Urdu
- عملیت پسندانہ
pragmatic in Bengali
- বাস্তববাদী
More languagesFewer languages
- pragmatic in Malayalam
- പ്രായോഗികമായ, പ്രാവർത്തികമായ, പ്രയോജനം മാത്രം നോക്കുന്ന, കാര്യക്ഷമമായ
- pragmatic in Kannada
- ವ್ಯಾವಹಾರಿಕ, ಕಾರ್ಯದೃಷ್ಟಿಯುಳ್ಳ, ಪ್ರಾಯೋಗಿಕ, ಆಚರಣೀಯ
- pragmatic in Arabic
- عَمَلِيّ ʕamaliyy, بْرَاغْمَاتِيّ brāḡmātiyy, عَمْلَانِيّ ʕamlāniyy
- pragmatic in Malay
- pragmatik, pragmatis
- pragmatic in Indonesian
- pragmatis
Examples of pragmatic in a sentence
- A defaultist believes that the default interpretation of the phrase "some eels are fish" is the pragmatic interpretation "some, but not all, eels are fish".
- Recent years have seen renewed interest in pragmatic research within the realm of social media platforms.
- The pragmatic strategies can be divided into three types, namely, explicit, modified, and implicit self-denigration.
Synonyms of pragmatic
Antonyms
Forms of pragmatic
| Adjective | |
|---|---|
| comparative | more pragmatic |
| superlative | most pragmatic |
| alternative form | pragmatical |
| alternative form | pragmatick |
| alternative form | pragmatique |
| Noun | |
| plural | pragmatics |
Origin of pragmatic
From Middle French pragmatique, from Late Latin pragmaticus (“relating to civil affair; in Latin, as a noun, a person versed in the law who furnished arguments and points to advocates and orators, a kind of attorney”), from Ancient Greek πραγματικός (pragmatikós, “active, versed in affairs”), from πρᾶγμα (prâgma, “a thing done, a fact”), in plural πράγματα (prágmata, “affairs, state affairs, public business, etc.”), from πράσσω (prássō, “to do”) (whence English practical).
Words formed from pragmatic
Phrases with pragmatic
Questions about pragmatic
- What does pragmatic mean?
- Pragmatic means practical, concerned with making decisions and actions that are useful in practice, not just theory.
- What is pragmatic in Hindi?
- Pragmatic in Hindi is व्यवहारिक (vyavhārik), आशावादी (āśāvādī). See Pragmatic meaning in Hindi.
- What part of speech is pragmatic?
- Pragmatic can be an adjective or a noun.
- How do you pronounce pragmatic?
- Pragmatic is pronounced /pɹæɡˈmætɪk/.
Words near pragmatic in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: pragmatic (page history and authors); pragmatic (Tamil Wiktionary) (page history and authors); pragmatic (Urdu, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); pragmatic (Bengali Wiktionary) (page history and authors); pragmatic (Olam, E.K. Kurup corpus) (dataset and license); pragmatic (Kannada Wiktionary) (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:
Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-us-pragmatic.ogg.
Cite this entry: “pragmatic.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/pragmatic. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.