Word.ws English Dictionary

reduplicative

reduplicative adjective: formed by redoubling; reduplicate, double.

Adjective

reduplicative (not comparable)

  1. Formed by redoubling; reduplicate, double
    • The loss of the reduplicative syllable in the perfect is sufficiently accounted for by the same occurrence in almost all the modern, and even some of the ancient branches of the Indo-Germanic family.1848, Chevalier Bunsen, Charles Meyer, Max Müller, Three Linguistic Dissertations
    • A hyphen (-) is generally used to indicate the boundary between the components of ordinary and reduplicative compounds in derivational morphology.2004, Jean Robert Opgenort, A Grammar of Wambule

Noun

reduplicative (plural reduplicatives)

  1. A word obtained by the process of reduplication.
    • Grammatically, Malay uses reduplication for plurals (burung = bird, burung-burung = birds) and thus repeated words are commonly heard in Malay speech; in contrast, in English reduplicatives are much less frequent and often involve phoneme modulation (ding-dong; wham-bam).2019, Li Huang, James Lambert, “Another Arrow for the Quiver: A New Methodology for Multilingual Researchers”, in Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, →DOI, page 10

Forms of reduplicative

pluralreduplicatives

Origin of reduplicative

From reduplicate + -ive.

Words formed from reduplicative

Questions about reduplicative

What does reduplicative mean?
Reduplicative means formed by redoubling; reduplicate, double.
What part of speech is reduplicative?
Reduplicative can be an adjective or a noun.

Words near reduplicative in the dictionary

  1. reduplicates
  2. reduplicating
  3. reduplication
  4. reduplicational
  5. reduplications
  6. reduplicative
  7. reduplicatively
  8. reduplicatives
  9. reduplicativity
  10. reduplicator
  11. reduplicators

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: reduplicative (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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