aggressive

Characterized by aggression; highly combative; prone to behave in a way that involves attacking (especially if unjustly) or arguing.

Adjective

  1. Characterized by aggression; highly combative; prone to behave in a way that involves attacking (especially if unjustly) or arguing.
    • an aggressive policy, war, person, nation
    • When a new aggressive fish is added to an aquarium with an already-established, territorial fish, the established fish will probably fight to protect its territory (the whole tank). - 2011, Judith S. Weis, Do Fish...
    • This highly-aggressive approach had results, but briefly caused a major uproar in parts of the United States, which was mitigated by the Webster–Ashburton Treaty in 1842, which formalised the U.S. Navy's contribution to...

    Synonyms: bare-knuckle

  2. Exploiting every opportunity to be applied.
    • This paper describes how aggressive loop unrolling is done in a retargetable optimizing compiler. - 1996, Tibor Gyimothy, Compiler Construction: 6th International Conference, CC '96, Linköping, Sweden, April 24 - 26,...
    • Since the most aggressive type of optimization a program can be subjected to is parallelization, understanding a program before attempting to parallelize it is a very important step. - 2001, Paul Feautrier, edited by...
    • However, aggressive compiler techniques such as loop unrolling, promoting of subscripted array variables into registers (especially in of subscripted array variables into registers (especially in loops) and...
  3. That spreads quickly or extensively; virulent; malignant.
  4. Involving high risk for potentially high reward.
    • an aggressive stock; an aggressive portfolio
  5. Female but having a male or masculine gender presentation; butch.
    • For quotations using this term, see Citations:aggressive.

Origin

Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *h₂éd Proto-Italic *ad Proto-Italic *ad- Latin ad- Proto-Indo-European *gʰredʰ-der. Latin gradior Latin aggredior Latin aggressuslbor. English aggress Proto-Indo-European *-wós Proto-Indo-European *-iHwósder. Latin -īvus Old French -ifbor. Middle English -yf English -ive English aggressive From aggress + -ive. Compare with French agressif.

Forms

more aggressive most aggressive

Antonyms

passive

Related

aggression aggressor

Derived

aggressively aggressive mimicry aggressiveness aggressivism aggressivist aggressivity alloaggressive antiaggressive autoaggressive deaggressivization hyperaggressive microaggressive nonaggressive overaggressive passive-aggressive superaggressive unaggressive

Noun

  1. One who is aggressive.
  2. A (Black) woman who presents as masculine; a butch.
    • [...]; usually the femme is the ho [at the costume party], and the butch/aggressive is the pimp. [...] An aggressive is a masculine-identified woman like the category of butch; aggressive is the contemporary term among...

Forms

aggressives