productive

comparative more productive · superlative most productive

1. Capable of producing something, especially in abundance; fertile.
2. Yielding good or useful results; constructive.
3. Of, or relating to the creation of goods or services.
4. human sciencesConsistently applicable to any of an open set of words.

   In practice, a productive prefix yields many attested words (especially new coinages) without loss of meaning. For example, re- (“again”) is highly productive (rebuild, rethink), whereas other prefixes are relatively less so.

   2026 April 28, Olha Matviyas, Victoria Rokoshevs’ka, Yulia Leshchyshyn, “THE MOST PRODUCTIVE PREFIXES IN ENGLISH MEDICAL TERMINOLOGY”, in The Future of Science, Technology and Economy, archived from the original on 08 Jul 2026, page 275

   1 more example

   Moreover, this relationship is a productive one, in the sense that when new Adjectives are created (e.g. ginormous concocted out of gigantic and enormous), then the corresponding Adverb form (in this case ginormously) can also be used. And in those exceptional cases where Adverbs do not end in -ly, they generally have the same form as the corresponding Adjective, as with hard, fast, etc.

   1988, Andrew Radford, Transformational grammar: a first course, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, page 138

5. medicineOf a cough, producing mucus or sputum from the respiratory tract.
6. medicineOf inflammation, producing new tissue.
7. mathematicsA type of set of natural numbers, related to mathematical logic; a set S is productive if there exists a total recursive function f such that ∀x∈ℕ,~~W_x⊆S⇒f(x)∈A⧵W_x, where W_x is a recursive function whose Gödel number is x.

   a productive set