Costive

//ˈkɑstɪv// adj, slang

adj, slang ·Moderate ·College level

Definitions

Adjective
  1. 1
    Constipated.

    "When I was mortall, this my costiue corps / Did lap vp Figs and Raisons in the Strand, / Where sitting I espi'd a louely Dame, / Whose maister wrought with Lingell and with All, / And vnder ground he vampied many a boote."

  2. 2
    Miserly, parsimonious. informal

    "Well, the shoemaker and his wife, Louise, may have been poor, needy, indigent, destitute, impecunious and impoverished — at least before the elves came along — but they had never been parsimonious, costive, miserly, penny-pinching or stinting. They were far from being avaricious, rapacious, mean or greedy. The shoemaker was uxorious about his wife, Louise, but he had never been usurious, even when he had money to lend […]"

Adjective
  1. 1
    retarding evacuation of feces; binding; constipating wordnet

Synonyms

All synonyms
blockedboundcongestedconstipatedfoulfouled

Example

More examples

"When I was mortall, this my costiue corps / Did lap vp Figs and Raisons in the Strand, / Where sitting I espi'd a louely Dame, / Whose maister wrought with Lingell and with All, / And vnder ground he vampied many a boote."

Etymology

From Middle French costivé, past participle of costiver (“to constipate”), ultimately from Latin cōnstīpātus (“constipated”). Doublet of constipate.

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