Reduplicative
adj, noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 A word obtained by the process of reduplication.
"Grammatically, Malay uses reduplication for plurals (burung = bird, burung-burung = birds) and thus repeated words are commonly heard in Malay speech; in contrast, in English reduplicatives are much less frequent and often involve phoneme modulation (ding-dong; wham-bam)."
- 1 Formed by redoubling; reduplicate, double not-comparable
"The loss of the reduplicative syllable in the perfect is sufficiently accounted for by the same occurrence in almost all the modern, and even some of the ancient branches of the Indo-Germanic family."
Example
More examples"The loss of the reduplicative syllable in the perfect is sufficiently accounted for by the same occurrence in almost all the modern, and even some of the ancient branches of the Indo-Germanic family."
Etymology
From reduplicate + -ive.
Related phrases
More for "reduplicative"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.