Conscriptive

adj

adj ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Adjective
  1. 1
    Pertaining to conscription.

    "The many attempts made to evade the operation of the conscriptive laws in France during the revolutionary war, induced the authorities to frame and enact a set of regulations for the guidance of those concerned in examining conscripts, embracing almost every point on which a doubt or difference of opinion can exist."

  2. 2
    Compulsory; required.

    "He pleaded very earnestly for such concurrent legislation which would operate as a conscriptive measure upon the accumulated wealth and resources of the country."

  3. 3
    Produced through the compulsory participation of the accused; violating the accused's right to avoid self-incrimination.

    "For example, statements made by the accused will be conscriptive. So too will blood samples, breath samples, pulled hairs, re-enactments of the crime, or even the act of standing in an identification lineup."

  4. 4
    Restrictive; constricting.

    "But it is also easy to understand how these "underlying" values, assumptions, and generic protocols explicitly rely on relinquishing the particularities of thinking to a conscriptive and regularizing social thought that amounts to repetition of the same."

  5. 5
    Chosen; adopted.

    "Whereas his music had once reflected his being caught between "opposed effects" (Solomon provides a particularly informative analysis of the andante/adagio movements of the middle seventeen-seventies, works that convey the sorrow he felt at his mother's death and the disintegration of the family structure), during the middle seventeen-eighties he used music to place himself in a new line of succession, with Haydn his conscriptive father substitute."

Example

More examples

"The many attempts made to evade the operation of the conscriptive laws in France during the revolutionary war, induced the authorities to frame and enact a set of regulations for the guidance of those concerned in examining conscripts, embracing almost every point on which a doubt or difference of opinion can exist."

Etymology

From conscript + -ive.

Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.