contraceptive
Americanadjective
-
tending or serving to prevent conception or impregnation.
-
pertaining to contraception.
noun
-
contraceptives
plural
adjective
noun
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of contraceptive
First recorded in 1890–95; contra- 1 ( def. ) + (con)ceptive ( def. )
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.
See Examples For:
As she played a game of telephone with the clinics, Vanessa ran into a complexity inherent to contraceptive research and development, itself a direly underfunded field.
From Slate ● Oct. 27, 2026
When Caroline Bailey was suffering with sharp, stabbing pains in her stomach, she thought it was being caused by her contraceptive coil.
From BBC ● Oct. 14, 2026
Clay Felker, the editor of Esquire, asked her to write about the social effects of the contraceptive pill, which was new at the time.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 23, 2026
One promising candidate was lynestrenol, a hormone drug currently approved for certain menstrual disorders and contraceptive use.
From Science Daily ● May 29, 2026
Ritual and ethical absention and the use of contraceptive drugs seem to have played the major part in maintaining this stability.
From "The Left Hand of Darkness" by Ursula K. Le Guin
The newly established entity will hold Bayer’s long-acting reversible contraceptives business.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 10, 2026
More than 100 million women worldwide now use oral contraceptives daily.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Apr. 24, 2026
This isn't an unusual story – if you're a chronically online woman in your 20s you'll have seen plenty of conversations about hormonal contraceptives like the pill, coil and implant.
From BBC ● Apr. 11, 2026
The teen birthrate fell 7% last year, extending a yearslong decline related to public-health campaigns and growing use of longer-acting contraceptives.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Apr. 9, 2026
—Gethenians tend to have their children young; most of them, after the age of twenty-four or so, use contraceptives, and they cease to be fertile in the female phase at about forty.
From "The Left Hand of Darkness" by Ursula K. Le Guin
Random Word
Spin the wheel and learn a new word!
Get a wordDefinitions 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.
