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
The inventors of the cuneiform system of writing had been a people who preceded the Semites in the occupation of Babylonia, and who spoke an agglutinative language utterly different from that of their Semitic successors.
From Fresh Light from the Ancient Monuments by Sayce, A. H. (Archibald Henry)
The agglutinative type, however, yet remains, and its grammar shows a luxuriance of grammatical combination second only to Turkish and Hungarian.
From Lectures on The Science of Language by Müller, Max
Their language is like that of the Magyars, an agglutinative tongue with tendencies towards inflections, but their physical structure allies them more nearly to the Teutons.
From Races and Immigrants in America by Commons, John R. (John Rogers)
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.
