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Formative   /fˈɔrmətɪv/   Listen
adjective
Formative  adj.  
1.
Giving form; having the power of giving form; plastic; as, the formative arts. "The meanest plant can not be raised without seed, by any formative residing in the soil."
2.
(Gram.) Serving to form; derivative; not radical; as, a termination merely formative.
3.
(Biol.) Capable of growth and development; germinal; as, living or formative matter.


noun
Formative  n.  (Gram.)
(a)
That which serves merely to give form, and is no part of the radical, as the prefix or the termination of a word.
(b)
A word formed in accordance with some rule or usage, as from a root.





Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48


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"Formative" Quotes from Famous Books



... in an organism we have these three things— formative matter, formed matter, and the forming principle or life; so in the soul we have the old nature, the renewed nature, and. the transforming ...
— Beautiful Thoughts • Henry Drummond
... so, the work of synthesis may be thought to have a higher practical value for the moment than the analysis which has prevailed in European thought for the last forty or fifty years. In the earlier part of the nineteenth century the great formative ideas which had been gathering volume and enthusiasm during the revolutionary period, took shape in complete systems of religious and philosophic truth—Kant, Hegel, Spencer, Comte. They have been followed by a period of criticism which has left none ...
— Progress and History • Various
... outlook, well informed as to the past, confident—but not reckless—of the future. Many Americans still read it who would be shocked by Tom Paine and bored with Edmund Burke. It has none of the literary genius of either of those writers, but its formative influence upon successive generations of political thinking has been steadying ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... consuming passion for learning, at the Quaker's boarding-school at Alderley. He had come thither from Wakefield at the age of thirteen—after the death of his father, who was, in a double sense, the cardinal formative influence in his life. The tones of his father's voice, his father's gestures, never departed from him; when he read aloud, particularly if it was poetry he read, his father returned in him. He could draw in those ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... and so anxious to insure its perpetuation, that it began to teach the principles of honest dealing to its babies in the cradle, and made the like teachings the staple of their culture thenceforward through all the years devoted to their education. Also, throughout the formative years temptations were kept out of the way of the young people, so that their honesty could have every chance to harden and solidify, and become a part of their very bone. The neighbouring towns were jealous ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain


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