discursive
adjective
passing aimlessly from one subject to another; digressive; rambling.
discursiveness
-
a word derived from
discursive.
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.
It’s a persuasive picture of a working artist, often fretting about money and trying to leverage his connections, and the actor makes the most of Hujar’s amusing, slightly abashed discursiveness.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Nov. 6, 2025
For some theatergoers, though, Nelson’s extreme discursiveness will feel overstretched; how long do you want to stare at even the loveliest, most industrious ants digging their way through the sand of an ant farm?
From New York Times ● Sep. 9, 2021
That the new season of “Problem Areas” centers on education issues is a useful strategy for containing Cenac’s antic tangents and absurdist discursiveness.
From The New Yorker ● May 16, 2019
Now, 180 years later, the same engaging discursiveness envelops us in the most successful portions of “Death and Mr. Pickwick,” Stephen Jarvis’s formidably knowledgeable, obsessive riff on all things Pickwick.
From Washington Post ● Jun. 22, 2015
A negative excellence is the absence of that discursiveness in composition, that tendency to digress into superfluous comment, which is this author's one prevailing fault.
From De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars by William Edward Simonds
