contrastive
Americanadjective
-
tending to contrast; contrasting. contrastive colors.
-
studying or exhibiting the congruences and differences between two languages or dialects without reference to their origins.
contrastive linguistics.
Other Word Forms
- contrastively adverb
- uncontrastive adjective
- uncontrastively adverb
Etymology
Origin of contrastive
Explanation
The adjective contrastive means "showing the difference between two things when you compare them" — like a contrastive analysis of American and British English. To contrast two things is to think about how they are different. So, the adjective contrastive is used to describe things that differ from one another. Contrastive colors in a painting can create an interesting image, while contrasting personalities can spark a feud. In language, contrastive words show contrast between two parts of a sentence; words like but and though are examples.
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.
They developed FAIR-Path, a framework based on an existing machine-learning method known as contrastive learning.
From Science Daily • Dec. 17, 2025
They began by using simple problem-solving techniques to construct sets of contrastive summaries -- a set of faithful, error-free summaries and a set of unfaithful summaries containing errors.
From Science Daily • Feb. 22, 2024
To create a more efficient alternative, in recent years researchers have turned to models built through a technique known as contrastive self-supervised learning.
From Science Daily • Oct. 30, 2023
The kinds of silences this work tests are called relative or contrastive, and they have some overlap with the study of holes.
From Scientific American • Jul. 10, 2023
Cicero ends with a final address to Catiline, and then with a contrastive apostrophe to Jupiter—effectively putting Catiline’s decision to depart under the compulsion of a God.
From "Words Like Loaded Pistols" by Sam Leith
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.
