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
Their absence, however, is readily explained by the persistence of the agglutinative principle, which renders them unnecessary.
From Man, Past and Present by Alfred Court Haddon
They belong to the agglutinative stage of development, and are distinguished from other groups by the presence, in full development, of the principle of prefixed and affixed grammatical additions to the roots of words.
From In the Andamans and Nicobars The Narrative of a Cruise in the Schooner "Terrapin" by C. Boden Kloss
In agglutinative languages the union of words may be compared to mechanical compounds, in inflective languages to chemical compounds.
From Webster's Unabridged Dictionary by Noah Webster
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.
