separative

Serving to separate.

Adjective

  1. Serving to separate.
    • […] that much more full and eminent Experiment of the Separative Virtue of extream Cold, that was made, against their Wills, by the […] Dutch men that Winter’d in Nova Zembla; - 1661, Robert Boyle, The Sceptical...
    • We have hitherto only observed the colouring substance itself, we ought now to consider the preparation of the ground which receives it: to inquire how it comes that every object hath this separative power over the...
    • Jews christianizing—Christians judaizing—puzzle me. I like fish or flesh. A moderate Jew is a more confounding piece of anomaly than a wet Quaker. The spirit of the synagogue is essentially separative. - 1823, Charles...
  2. Tending to keep oneself separate from others.
    • Pye had never forgotten or forgiven the ingenious fraud. It had taught him secretiveness, made him even more lone and separative. He had withdrawn from the world of men, academic and otherwise. - 1935, Warwick Deeping,...
    • I was working hard, and living a rather separative existence, without realizing at the time what this aloofness meant for me. - 1938, Warwick Deeping, chapter 13, in Malice of Men, New York: Knopf:

Origin

Latin separativus.

Forms

more separative most separative

Related

separational

Derived

separative error separatively separativeness

Noun

  1. Something that serves to separate.
    • 1853, A. F. Lendy, The Principles of War, London: Parker, Furnivall, and Parker, “Strategy,” Chapter 4, p. 117, […] as for the distance between [the roads], it varies according to the strength of the army and the nature...
    • He […] independently identified the oblique wedge as a separative of words [in cuneiform writing] […] - 1916, Lewis Spence, chapter 1, in Myths and Legends of Babylonia and Assyria, London: Harrap, page 62:

Forms

separatives