refective

refective noun: that which refreshes.

Noun

refective (plural refectives)

That which refreshes.
- His auditors gaine so refreshed him, as to take away the sense of all paine in teaching. Their profit was his refectives and reparatives.1633, Daniel Dyke, Two Treaties
- You should have refreshed our bowels, been as cordials, and sweet refectives, after all our wearisome labours: but have not you dealt unkindly with us?1809, Lewis Stuckley, A Gospel Glass, page 272
A type of animal that eats its food twice, by reconsuming partially digested matter.
- While the rabbits mentioned in Leviticus 11 appear to chew the cud, we now know that they are not, in fact, ruminants but technically "refectives" - that is , they chew their droppings to better digest their food, not cud like a cow.2007, Robert J. Hutchinson, Politically Incorrect Guide to the Bible

refective (comparative more refective, superlative most refective)

(obsolete) Refreshing; restoring.
- Some six or eight hours after repeat the said sudorifick, and thereupon the Refective Cordial.1673, Gideon Harvey, A Discourse of the Plague, page 151
- The initiation was followed by a very refective banquet , after which Delta Chi and Lambda took the train for their respective homes, voting Xi a chapter that knew how to entertain.1889 November, “Delta Chi–Wabash College”, in The Sigma Chi Quarterly, volume 9, number 1, page 51
(obsolete) Nutritional; full of vitamins.
- Raw potato starch, for instance, has a high refective power, while rice, wheat and rye starches are reported to have little or none.1939, The Vitamins, page 210
- In fact we (Kon, 1935; Kon, Kon and Mattick, 1938) found no spectacular difference in the bacteriological picture of the caecal contents or of the faeces when rats thriving on a refective diet were compared in this respect with rats declining on a vitamin B deficient diet or on the refective diet...1945, Proceedings of the Nutrition Society- Volume 3, page 221

There is a cool and pleasant refective exceedingly agreeable in social parties, large or small, at all seasons of the year, and especially so in the hot weather of our long dry summers.1995, Anne Cooper Funderburg, Chocolate, Strawberry, and Vanilla: A History of American Ice Cream, page 33:
Three groups of refected rats were gven, respectively, the refective diet , the cooked refective diet , and the refective diet with succinylsulphathiazole.1949, University of Reading. National Institute for Research in Dairying, Shinfield, Report, page 101:

28 more rhymesFewer rhymes

What does refective mean?: Refective means that which refreshes.
How do you use refective in a sentence?: There is a cool and pleasant refective exceedingly agreeable in social parties, large or small, at all seasons of the year, and especially so in the hot weather of our long dry summers.
What part of speech is refective?: Refective can be a noun or an adjective.
What is the plural of refective?: The plural of refective is refectives.

Adapted from Wiktionary: refective (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: 2026-09-02

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