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ENGLISH · A WORD WITH POSSIBILITIES

abusive.

Prone to treat someone badly by coarse, insulting words or other maltreatment; vituperative; reproachful; scurrilous.

7 characters3 syllables approx.English language

Meaning & usage

adj/əˈbjuː.sɪv/Received-Pronunciation/əˈbju.sɪv/US/əˈbju.zɪv/US
  1. Prone to treat someone badly by coarse, insulting words or other maltreatment; vituperative; reproachful; scurrilous.

    All they could ever do was to shout abusive inanities at me.
  2. Tending to deceive; fraudulent.

    obsolete
  3. Tending to misuse; practising or containing abuse.

    archaic
  4. Being physically or emotionally injurious; characterized by repeated violence or other abuse.

  5. Wrongly used; perverted; misapplied; unjust; illegal.

  6. Catachrestic.

    archaic
Where this word comes from

First attested in the 1530s. From French abusif, from Latin abūsīvus, from abusus + -ivus (“-ive”). Equivalent to abuse + -ive.

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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.

Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.