Word.ws English Dictionary

How to use restrictive in a sentence

24 example sentences · adjective, noun

Restrictive means confining, limiting, containing within defined bounds. Example: “Only prudent expenditure may provide quality within a restrictive budget.”

Examples of restrictive by meaning

adjectiveConfining, limiting, containing within defined bounds.

  • The help tended to be officious, the rules, if heeded, restrictive, and the management meddlesome.1961 November 10, Joseph Heller, “The Soldier in White”, in Catch-22 […], New York, N.Y.: Simon and Schuster, →OCLC, page 168
  • The pinnacle of the effort to fix restrictive meanings to a set of terminology can be found in two papers in American Speech by Feinsilver (1979, 1980).2018, James Lambert, “A multitude of ‘lishes’: The nomenclature of hybridity”, in English World-Wide, page 7
  • But RDG is taking a sledgehammer to crack a nut and punishing many millions of honest passengers by making tickets more restrictive.2026 March 18, Philip Haigh, “Tickets please: 2p per scan to offset fraudulent refunds?”, in RAIL, number 1057, page 48

adjectiveLimiting free and easy bodily movement.

  • The clothes again — we're back to high heels and restrictive little femmy outfits.1980 December 6, Cindy Rizzo, Nancy Toder, “Jewish, Lesbian, Feminist, Psychologist, Author—All of the above and more”, in Gay Community...

More sentences with restrictive

  • Only prudent expenditure may provide quality within a restrictive budget.From the entry prudent
  • In single-level settings, a negative binomial model is often preferred as it relaxes the restrictive equidispersion assumption.2015 July 24, “The Determinants of Costs and Length of Stay for Hip Fracture Patients”, in PLOS ONE, →DOI. From the entry equidispersion
  • “The cyberwarriors are held back by extremely restrictive rules of engagement.”2009 August 2, John Markoff, “Halted ’03 Iraq Plan Illustrates U.S. Fear of Cyberwar Risk”, in New York Times. From the entry cyberwarrior
  • The Reagan Government was to be much more financially restrictive than the previous Carter team.1985, Rodger Bradley, Amtrak: The US National Railroad Passenger Corporation, Blandford Press, page 130. From the entry state-assisted
  • Such a schematist approach and methods have always proved restrictive and conducive to some dogma or other.1978, Survey Sarajevo - Volume 5, page 162. From the entry schematist
  • Other individuals called for specific restrictive provisions about matters such as misogyny, incelism, fraud, self-harm and the like.2022 April 27, Andrew Tettenborn, “A death sentence for freedom online”, in The Critic, archived from the original on 12 Oct 2022. From the entry incelism
  • A restrictive license, in this context, is any license that places additional requirements or caveats on use of the data.2021 March 26, Anne E. Thessen, Paul Bogdan, David J. Patterson, Theresa M. Casey, César Hinojo-Hinojo, Orlando de Lange, Melissa A.…. From the entry microannotation
  • Both restrictive and indulgent parents can either underparent or overparent.2016, Shakta Khalsa, The Yoga Way to Radiance. From the entry overparent
  • I believe in freedom of movement and view the current government's restrictive attitude as both socially and economically misguided.2013 September 28, Kenan Malik, “London is special, but not that special”, in The New York Times, New York, N.Y.: The New York Times…. From the entry misguided
  • They share opportunities, rewards, and responsibilities equitably, without regard to gender, ethnicity, social, status, or any other falsely restrictive characteristic.2000, Sheldon Z. Kramer with Mardeene Mitchell, “The End Is Embedded in the Beginning”, in Hidden Faces of the Soul: Ten Secrets for…. From the entry equitably
  • This is known as the 'thin end of the wedge' argument raised by people who don't want to lose the protection of restrictive covenants.2018 August 14, April Stroud, Making Sense of Land Law, Bloomsbury Publishing, →ISBN. From the entry thin end of the wedge
  • For ace and aro people, the possibilities for diverse relationships are endless, despite how pop culture often brands our identity as restrictive and confined.2016, Laura Chan, "My sexual preference is nope", Dalhousie Gazette (Dalhousie University), 12 February - 18 February 2016, page 16. From the entry aro
  • The more restrictive exact, non-orientable Lagrangian endocobordisms do not exist for any exactly fillable Legendrian knot but do exist for any stabilized Legendrian knot.2015, Orsola Capovilla-Searle, Lisa Traynor, “Non-Orientable Lagrangian Cobordisms between Legendrian Knots”, in arXiv. From the entry endocobordisms
  • At the transcolonial level, white spaces were organized and shored up outwardly through the sharing of restrictive immigration policies among (former) British colonies.2010, Penelope Edmonds, Urbanizing Frontiers: Indigenous Peoples and Settlers in 19th-Century Pacific Rim Cities, UBC Press, →ISBN, page 230. From the entry transcolonial
  • Even if we restrict ourselves to two dimensions, as we've already seen, pictorial proof-systems are too restrictive: they can't handle curves lacking stipulationally-obvious properties.2004, Tinne Hoff Kjeldsen, Stig Andur Pedersen, Lise Mariane Sonne-Hansen, New Trends in the History and Philosophy of Mathematics…. From the entry stipulationally
  • Meanwhile, Scotland shows us a successful alternative to restrictive English laws, with a national “right to roam” – despite nearly 60% of its land being privately owned.2023 January 17, Sophie Pavelle, “The Dartmoor wild camping ban further limits our right to roam. It must be fought”, in The Guardian. From the entry right to roam
  • But the Republican blockade in the Senate left Democrats without a clear path forward, and without a means to beat back the restrictive voting laws racing through Republican-led states.2021 June 22, Nicholas Fandos, “Republicans Block Voting Rights Bill, Dealing Blow to Biden and Democrats”, in The New York Times. From the entry beat back
  • For example, envisioning the legal arena as a noosphere replete with legal noosigns that are restrictive and system generating in their social constructions, leads to new research agendas.2013 September, Dragan Milovanovic, “Postmodernism and Thinking Quantum Holographically”, in Critical Criminology, volume 23, page 354. From the entry noosign
  • However, as a satellect moves closer to its matrilect, it would seem as though the reverse process should take place: the rules should become more restrictive, less simple.1971, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa Working Papers in Linguistics III, parts 3–4, page 20. From the entry matrilect
  • Zimzum is a "restrictive contraction" which takes place in the first emanation of light and thus is the seed event which precedes all others in the act of creation.1952, Carmine G Barbra, A Search for God, Trafford, published 1952, page 148. From the entry zimzum

Meaning of restrictive

  1. adjective Confining, limiting, containing within defined bounds.
  2. adjective Limiting free and easy bodily movement.
  3. noun A clause that narrows the meaning of a noun or noun phrase.

Full definition of restrictive

Questions about restrictive in a sentence

How do you use restrictive in a sentence?
Restrictive is used as an adjective and noun. For example: “Only prudent expenditure may provide quality within a restrictive budget.”
What is a short sentence with restrictive?
“Both restrictive and indulgent parents can either underparent or overparent.”
What does restrictive mean?
Restrictive means confining, limiting, containing within defined bounds.

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: restrictive (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.

Last updated:

Cite this page: “How to use restrictive in a sentence.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/sentences/restrictive. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.