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ENGLISH · A WORD WITH POSSIBILITIES

expressive.

Effectively conveying thought or feeling.

10 characters3 syllables approx.English language

Meaning & usage

adj/ɪkˈspɹɛsɪv/Received-Pronunciation/ɪkˈspɹɛsɪv/Canada, General-American/ɛkˈspɹɛsɪv/Canada, General-American/ɛkˈspɹæsɛv/
  1. Effectively conveying thought or feeling.

    expressive dancing
    a gesture expressive of the utmost contempt
  2. Conveying the speaker's emotions and/or attitudes, in addition to the denotative or literal meaning.

  3. Able to represent a number of ideas or concepts.

    A programming language that is Turing complete is more expressive than one that is not.
Where this word comes from

From Middle French expressif.

noun/ɪkˈspɹɛsɪv/Received-Pronunciation/ɪkˈspɹɛsɪv/Canada, General-American/ɛkˈspɹɛsɪv/Canada, General-American/ɛkˈspɹæsɛv/
  1. Any word or phrase that expresses (that the speaker, writer, or signer has) a certain attitude toward or information about the referent.

  2. A word or phrase, belonging to a distinct word class or having distinct morphosyntactic properties, with semantic symbolism (for example, an onomatopoeia), variously considered either a synonym, a hypernym or a hyponym of ideophone.

Where this word comes from

From Middle French expressif.

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expressive studioexpressive workshello, expressive

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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.