ameliorative

comparative more ameliorative · superlative most ameliorative

1. Able to repair or ameliorate.

   One night while he was moaning on about his sorry existence I said: Do you really want to change it? Of course I do, he said, but nothing I’ve tried has been ameliorative.

   2007, Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Faber and Faber (2009), page 175

2. human sciencesSuggesting or relating to a positive or approving evaluation.

   […]personal nicknames can generally be divided into positively marked (ameliorative) ones, usually given by family members and friends as a sign of affection and acceptance, and those negatively marked (pejorative or derogatory), whose aim is to mock or ridicule a person[…]

   2016, Olga Panić Kavgić, “Linguistic Creativity at Work: Nicknames of Women Tennis Players”, in English Studies Today, archived from the original on 20 Aug 2018

3. human sciencesOf or relating to conceptual engineering, the normative study of which conceptual demarcation is most conducive to solve the problems the concept is a priori taken to solve.

   ameliorative inquiry

   2 more examples

   ameliorative analysis

   ameliorative project

plural amelioratives

1. That which betters or improves.

   With such conventional Keynesian amelioratives, the economy normally recovers with output and employment on the rise, and, unfortunately, with inflation picking up too.

   1973, Alan Gartner, Public service employment, page 106

   1 more example

   It certainly means the stripping from Parliament of endless debates on niggling parsimonies and trivial amelioratives; the thousand and one unreal fights and distractions which has kept democracy from winning the other half of freedom.

   1944, Charles Smith, An Economic Plan for Democracy, page 3

2. rarehuman sciencesA linguistic unit (such as a word, morpheme) that implies a positive or approving evaluation.

   Moreover, diminutives, augmentatives, pejoratives and amelioratives have always been analysed as independent categories, neglecting the possible interrelations among them.

   2015, Nicola Grandi, Edinburgh Handbook of Evaluative Morphology, page 4

   Antonyms: pejorative