Word.ws English Dictionary

How to use putative in a sentence

37 example sentences · adjective

Putative means commonly believed or deemed to be the case; generally assumed. Example: “Just as Prince Sihanouk is fronting for the Khmer Rouge today . . . so also was he their putative leader from 1970 to 1975.”

Examples of putative by meaning

adjectiveCommonly believed or deemed to be the case; generally assumed.

  • Just as Prince Sihanouk is fronting for the Khmer Rouge today . . . so also was he their putative leader from 1970 to 1975.1989, William E. Colby and Jeremy J. Stone, "US must support Thailand if Cambodia is to survive," Milwaukee Sentinel (Los Angeles Times...
  • If they are in fact sound, then, of course, desire-utilitarianism need not account for the putative wrongness of infanticide.1991 May 24, Clement Dore, Moral Scepticism, Springer, →ISBN, page 85
  • This independence is still presupposed as a condition of agency; but this presupposition leaves in place the epistemic possibility that our putative freedom is illusory, that we are automata rather than agents.1995, Henry E. Allison, “Spontaneity and Autonomy in Kant's Conception of the Self”, in Karl Ameriks and Dieter Sturma, editors, The Modern...

adjectiveAccepted by supposition rather than as a result of proof.

  • You have the putative assumption, because everybody is interrogated, that everybody who has entered is heterosexual.1993, United States. Congress. House. Committee on Armed Services, Policy Implications of Lifting the Ban on Homosexuals in the Military...
  • We mistakenly identify the reasoning that we employ in order to show that a putative judgement is grounded, with what makes for the difference between its being a judgement rather than guesswork.2016 May 23, Max Deutscher, In Sensible Judgement, Routledge, →ISBN, page 99

adjectiveAlleged, purported, ostensible, professed.

  • A putative love tonic was made from the water in which myrtle leaves and flowers had been steeped.1961, Harry E. Wedeck, Dictionary of Aphrodisiacs, New York: The Citadel Press, page 162
  • Of course, Karr's putative pedophilia would not make him guilty of murder.2006 August 18, Unmesh Kher, “No Neat Endings for the JonBenet Case”, in Time
  • I’ve been subject to several gropings and gross jibes of the type you’d expect behind a junior-high gym dance, and they’ve been delivered by grownups, putative pals, not one of whom I even dimly considered getting jiggy with.2016 August 11, Mary Karr, “The Crotchgrabber”, in The New Yorker

adjectiveProspective, potential, proposed.

  • Having put some distance between herself and her putative book, she relaxed by continuing to lecture and to work on other projects.2004, Katherine Joslin, Jane Addams: A Writer's Life, University of Illinois Press, →ISBN, page 74
  • One of the criteria of design selection is therefore availability of applicable analysis techniques specifically adapted to the putative design.2008 November 27, Egon Börger, Antonio Cisternino, Advances in Software Engineering: Lipari Summer School 2007, Lipari Island, Italy, July...
  • He was sacked from the Liverpool & Manchester and his place as surveyor was taken by Charles Vignoles, a slender Irishman who had recently carried out an excellent survey of the route between London and Brighton for another putative railway.2009 October 1, Christian Wolmar, Fire and Steam: A New History of the Railways in Britain, Atlantic Books Ltd, →ISBN

More sentences with putative

  • Moreover, in silico analysis of the ITS sequences indicated the presence of putative pseudogenic ITS types.2015 August 8, “Molecular and Cytogenetic Characterization of Wild Musa Species”, in PLOS ONE, →DOI. From the entry pseudogenic
  • Considering gene function, ST8SIA2 could be related to the putative pathological mechanism of both schizophrenia and BD.2015 September 30, “Association between ST8SIA2 and the Risk of Schizophrenia and Bipolar I Disorder across Diagnostic Boundaries”, in…. From the entry polysialyltransferase
  • This putative SC phenotype may facilitate the identification and isolation of limbal epithelial SCs.2004 May, Zhuo Chen, Cintia S. de Paiva, Lihui Luo, Francis L. Kretzer, Stephen C. Pflugfelder, “Characterization of Putative Stem Cell…. From the entry sc
  • Detailed SEM study showed that putative mechanosensillae are distributed all around the frontal as well as other projections.2015 July 30, “Long Frontal Projections Help Battus philenor (Lepidoptera: Papilionidae) Larvae Find Host Plants”, in PLOS ONE, →DOI. From the entry mechanosensillae
  • Putative structural matches include: ( 34 ) castanoside B.2015 August 22, “Castanea sativa (European Chestnut) Leaf Extracts Rich in Ursene and Oleanene Derivatives Block Staphylococcus aureus…. From the entry castanoside
  • Common in English, where in some putative compounds, such as autocrat or technocrat, both members would be combining forms.2007, P. H. Matthews, “combining form”, in The concise Oxford dictionary of linguistics, 2nd edition, Oxford [u.a.]: Oxford University…. From the entry combining form
  • As in the West, only about 50 per cent of patients with slim fully investigated will have a putative pathogen identified.2003, Charled F. Gilks, “HIV in the Developing World”, in David A. Warrell et al., editors, Oxford Textbook of Medicine, 4th edition…. From the entry slim
  • The putative advantage of Androderm is that it can result in direct absorption of testosterone across nonscrotal skin.2000, Lucretia Van den Berg, Endocrinology of aging, page 142. From the entry nonscrotal
  • The PE teacher, the putative authority on all things sporting, went out, as they say, without troubling the scorers.1993, Tom Raabe, Sports for the Athletically Impaired. From the entry without troubling the scorers
  • These are necessary experiments for eventual realization of the goal of localizating the putative R-DNA and construction of pHr plant-cloning vectors.1981, G. H. Bourne, Kenneth L. Giles, Alan G. Atherly, Biology of the Rhizobiaceae. From the entry localizate
  • Specifically, genome size may help resolve conflicting hypotheses about the origin of polyploids (auto- vs. allopolyploidy) and identify putative parental combinations in hybridogenous species.2015 July 25, “Evolutionary and Taxonomic Implications of Variation in Nuclear Genome Size: Lesson from the Grass Genus Anthoxanthum…. From the entry hybridogenous
  • The software Neuroexplorer was used for morphometrical and quantitative analyses of reconstructed cells, including total dendritic length and distances between somata and putative synaptic contacts.2015, Yoshiyuki Kubota et al., “Functional effects of distinct innervation styles of pyramidal cells by fast spiking cortical…. From the entry morphometrical
  • If a quarto forme includes a putative page one, for instance, that side of the sheet would also include pages four, five, and eight.2011, Eugene Giddens, How to Read a Shakespearean Play Text, page 41. From the entry forme
  • The palazzo has always fronted on a bus stop—but this putative man of the people has kindly put an end to that public service.2010, Ingrid D Rowland, "The Siege of Rome", New York Review of Books, Blog, 26 March. From the entry front
  • Hunt mentioned vulnology as a putative specialty in wound care, not tissue viability per se, and dismissed the proposal as being too narrow.2008, R. White, “Tissue viability in tomorrow's NHS”, in Journal of Wound Care. From the entry vulnology
  • Designed by the Parlement, the grisly mise-en-scène, which horrified many philosophes, was intended to wipe the Parlement's slate clean of any putative stain of anti-monarchism.2002, Colin Jones, The Great Nation, Penguin, published 2003, page 231. From the entry anti-monarchism
  • In this issue of HeartRhythm is a very interesting article by Ragupathi et al, who describe the natural history of patients with putative intrahisian atrioventricular (AV) block.2018, Melvin M. Scheinman, “Progression of intrahisian atrioventricular block: Will this presage a renaissance of His-bundle studies?”, in…. From the entry intrahisian
  • The two go hand in hand: any attempt to machinise consciousness is invariably associated with a (half-conscious) tendency to confer consciousness upon a putative machinery (of consciousness).2016, R. Tallis, Enemies of Hope: A Critique of Contemporary Pessimism, page 300. From the entry machinise
  • These putative indeterminate imperfectives are innovative in form precisely because they add a manner meaning to the range of lexical meanings available to Proto-Slavic motion verbs.2010, Viktoria Hasko, Renee Perelmutter, “Introduction: Verbs of motion in Slavic languages: Paths for exploration”, in Viktoria Hasko…. From the entry imperfective
  • Strong on administrative competence, the ministers as a group were united in their indebtedness to Fleury and in a collective mistrust of any putative successor from the court.2002, Colin Jones, The Great Nation, Penguin, published 2003, pages 120–1. From the entry indebtedness
  • Sharryn Kasmir's analysis enables us to penetrate the otherwise paradoxical situation in which cooperators in this putative postclass paradise are beginning to organize syndicates to protect their interests.1996, Sharryn Kasmir, The Myth of Mondragon, →ISBN. From the entry postclass
  • The region of IKK- containing the leucine zipper-like motif was required both for homodimerization of IKK- and for formation of heterodimers with IKK-, whereas the putative helix-loop-helix region was dispensible.2026 October 31, (Please provide the book title or journal name), volume 278, number 5339, →DOI, pages 866–870. From the entry dispensible
  • We evaluate evolutionary scenarios that may have given rise to the observed distribution of putative xyloglucanases in fungi and discuss possible biological contexts in which these enzymes could have evolved.2024 November, Emily D Trudeau, Harry Brumer, Mary L Berbee, “Origins of xyloglucan‐degrading enzymes in fungi”, in New Phytologist…. From the entry xyloglucanase
  • This is counterintuitive in the sense that most MVPA analyses use nonsmoothed data sets and a putative strength of MVPA is utilizing spatial information that is lost during spatial smoothing.2015 August 5, “Decoding the Traumatic Memory among Women with PTSD: Implications for Neurocircuitry Models of PTSD and Real-Time fMRI…. From the entry nonsmoothed
  • Because (1) is postulated and at the same time used as a covering law, the putative explanations are vacuous in the sense in which explanatory appeals to dormitive virtue are.2003, Henry E. Kyburg, Mariam Thalos, Probability is the Very Guide of Life, page 66. From the entry dormitive virtue
  • MTV is a singles medium, as is the hottest (warmest?) new radio strategy God help us, “adult contemporary”; even AOR devotes the contemporary portion of its programming to putative singles.1990 January 2, Robert Christgau, “1980–1989: Rockism Faces the World”, in The Village Voice, archived from the original on 16 Jan 2022. From the entry AOR

Meaning of putative

  1. adjective Commonly believed or deemed to be the case; generally assumed.
  2. adjective Accepted by supposition rather than as a result of proof.
  3. adjective Alleged, purported, ostensible, professed.

Full definition of putative

Questions about putative in a sentence

How do you use putative in a sentence?
Putative is used as an adjective. For example: “Just as Prince Sihanouk is fronting for the Khmer Rouge today . . . so also was he their putative leader from 1970 to 1975.”
What is a short sentence with putative?
“Putative structural matches include: ( 34 ) castanoside B.”
What does putative mean?
Putative means commonly believed or deemed to be the case; generally assumed.

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: putative (page history and authors) and the entries each sentence comes from. Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the sentences, left out offensive ones and quotations older than 1900, and marked the word in each. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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