quantitative
Americanadjective
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that is or may be estimated by quantity.
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of or relating to the describing or measuring of quantity.
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of or relating to a metrical system, as that of classical verse, based on the alternation of long and short, rather than accented and unaccented, syllables.
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of or relating to the length of a spoken vowel or consonant.
adjective
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involving or relating to considerations of amount or size Compare qualitative
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capable of being measured
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prosody denoting or relating to a metrical system, such as that in Latin and Greek verse, that is based on the relative length rather than stress of syllables
Other Word Forms
Etymology
Origin of quantitative
First recorded in 1575–85; from Medieval Latin quantitātīvus, equivalent to Latin quantitāt- (stem of quantitās “amount”) + -īvus adjective suffix; see origin at quantity, -ive
Explanation
If your boss asks you to do a quantitative analysis of this month's ice cream sales, he's not asking you to talk about how pleasant the customer interactions were. He wants numbers: how many cones did you sell of each flavor? If quantitative sounds like the word quantity to you, you're on the right track. Something that's quantitative is expressed in terms of quantity. When you're trying to figure out how well your new business is doing, there are all sorts of factors you need to think about, but only some of them can be measured in numbers. Those are quantitative. The other things, like say, how pleasant the room feels, would be qualitative, a word that's often paired with quantitative.
Vocabulary lists containing quantitative
TEKS ELAR Academic Vocabulary List (5th-7th grades)
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The Scientific Method
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
“For me, the most important data point was the purge External link of the highest levels of China’s military a couple months ago,” said Arjun Jayaraman, Quantitative Portfolio Manager at Causeway Capital Management.
From Barron's • May 19, 2026
Microcomputed tomography imaging for this project was performed at the Penn State Center for Quantitative Imaging, an Institute of the Energy and the Environment core research facility.
From Science Daily • May 1, 2026
Quantitative easing has been a key tool for producing stimulus in the economy during modern recessions.
From Barron's • Feb. 11, 2026
Quantitative finance has long been a magnet for mathematicians precisely because the field poses some of the most intricate mathematical problems used anywhere in industry.
From The Wall Street Journal • Nov. 18, 2025
Quantitative data should also be assembled to test my preliminary calculations suggesting differing rates of diffusion along the major axes of Eurasia, the Americas, and Africa.
From "Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies" by Jared M. Diamond
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
