elective.
Of, or pertaining to voting or elections; involving a choice between options.
Meaning & usage
Of, or pertaining to voting or elections; involving a choice between options.
Open to choice; freely chosen; (also, usually) unnecessary; minor.
After accounting for all of my required courses, there is hardly any room in my schedule for any elective ones.
Scheduled and nonemergent (regardless of whether necessary or unnecessary and whether minor or serious).
It was very confusing hearing my cancer surgery being classified as "elective surgery". Am I "electing" to live rather than die?
Where this word comes from
Etymology tree English elect Proto-Indo-European *-wós Proto-Indo-European *-iHwósder. Latin -īvus Old French -ifbor. Middle English -yf English -ive English elective From elect + -ive.
Something that is an option or may be freely chosen, especially a course of study.
I still need to decide which electives to take along with my compulsory courses next semester.
Where this word comes from
Etymology tree English elect Proto-Indo-European *-wós Proto-Indo-European *-iHwósder. Latin -īvus Old French -ifbor. Middle English -yf English -ive English elective From elect + -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.