destructive
- 1Causing serious damage or ruin to whatever it affects.
Critics warned that the new policy would be destructive to local communities.
Few habits are as destructive as ignoring small problems until they grow.
Similardamaging, harmful, ruinous, devastating, detrimental
Oppositeconstructive, beneficial, harmless
Note
Behind every sense of the word stands Latin destruere, 'to tear down', which reached English through Middle French destructif. The adjective compares with more and most (more destructive, the most destructive), never with -er or -est. It stretches easily from physical ruin to harm done to a person, as in a social scene that proved personally destructive to the people inside it.
- 2Causing a thing to break down or come apart into its separate pieces.
Cells rely on destructive metabolic pathways to split stored fats and sugars into smaller molecules.
Destructive distillation heats coal without air, breaking it down into coke, tar, and gas.
Similarcatabolic
Oppositeanabolic, constructive
Note
This is a neutral, technical use. Breaking down here is a working process, not a harm. Catabolism is called a destructive metabolism because it splits molecules apart and releases energy. It is the most literal reading of the Latin 'tear down' behind the everyday 'damaging' sense: taking something apart rather than ruining it, with no judgment attached.
- 3Causing irreversible change; resulting in a loss of information that cannot be recovered.
The software warns users before any destructive operation deletes the source files.
Compressing an image with this format is destructive and degrades quality permanently.
Similarirreversible, lossy
Oppositenondestructive, lossless, reversible
Note
Computing borrows the word for operations that cannot be undone, because once they are applied the original data is gone. Blurring an image is destructive, since the lost detail cannot be recovered. Rotating it is not, since rotating it back restores the original. Here it works as a near-synonym of lossy, and the useful test is whether the earlier state can be rebuilt.
Practice
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Origin
From Middle French destructif, from Latin destructivus, formed from the past participle of destruere ("to tear down, destroy") plus the suffix -ivus.