agglutinative
Americanadjective
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tending or having power to agglutinate or unite.
an agglutinative substance.
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Linguistics. pertaining to or noting a language, as Turkish, characterized by agglutination.
adjective
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tending to join or capable of joining
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Also: agglomerative. linguistics denoting languages, such as Hungarian, whose morphology is characterized by agglutination Compare analytic synthetic polysynthetic
Other Word Forms
Etymology
Origin of agglutinative
First recorded in 1625–35; agglutinate + -ive
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.
This frugality, its most basic trait, is then tempered by its second most basic trait, its agglutinative nature—the construction of words by the incessant addition of prefixes and suffixes to the roots.
From The New Yorker • Oct. 24, 2016
One day, discussing Turkish, he asked a visitor if he knew what an agglutinative language was.
From New York Times • Mar. 9, 2012
It is syllabic agglutinative, that is, the word inflections are made up by adding syllables to the root word that is never lost.
From Heathen Master Filcsik by Mikszáth, Kálmán
Its place in the general series of idioms has at last been well defined—it is an agglutinative and incorporating language, with some tendency to polysynthetism.
From Basque Legends With an Essay on the Basque Language by Webster, Wentworth
The language was, in fact, one of the agglutinative dialects spoken in Elam, the native language of Susa itself being closely related to it.
From A Primer of Assyriology by Sayce, A. H. (Archibald Henry)
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.
