DictionaryAI

productive

adjective
USpruh-DUK-tiv/pɹəˈdʌk.tɪv/

7 meanings of productive

Practice

  1. 1
    adjective
    Yielding good or useful results; helpful and constructive.

    The negotiations proved productive, ending in a signed agreement.

    He spent a productive afternoon clearing his backlog of emails.

    Similarfruitful, constructive, useful, worthwhile, valuable

    Oppositeunproductive, fruitless, futile, useless

  2. 2
    adjective
    Able to make or grow something, especially in large quantities.

    The region's productive farmland feeds millions of people.

    These fishing grounds remain productive despite heavy use.

    Similarfertile, fruitful, rich, prolific, abundant

    Oppositebarren, infertile, unproductive

  3. 3
    adjective
    Relating to the activity of turning out goods or supplying services in an economy.

    Economists distinguish productive sectors from those that merely move money around.

    The country rebuilt its productive capacity after the war.

  4. 4
    adjective
    In medicine, used of a cough that clears mucus or sputum out of the respiratory tract.

    The patient presented with a productive cough lasting over two weeks.

    Clinicians note whether a cough is productive before choosing treatment.

    Similarwet

    Oppositedry, nonproductive

    Note

    Medical usage ties this sense to a single noun. A productive cough brings material up from the lower respiratory tract. Its counterpart is the dry or nonproductive cough, which raises nothing. Keep it apart from the "useful results" meaning: a productive cough is not a helpful one, only one that brings something up.

  5. 5
    adjective
    Able to be applied consistently to any word in an open, expandable set.

    The suffix '-able' remains highly productive in modern English.

    Productive affixes let speakers coin words that listeners instantly understand.

    Oppositeunproductive

    Note

    A linguist's measure of how alive a word-building pattern is. An affix or rule counts as productive when it reaches new words as they arrive, not just the ones already established. Andrew Radford's Transformational Grammar: A First Course (1988) makes the point with ginormous: once it was coined from gigantic and enormous, ginormously was usable at once. The opposite is a fossilized pattern, which survives only in a fixed set of old forms.

  6. 6
    adjective
    Of inflammation: producing new tissue.

    Chronic infection can lead to productive inflammation in the surrounding tissue.

    Pathologists noted productive inflammation around the implant.

    Note

    Pathology uses the word quite literally here: the inflammation builds something, laying down new connective tissue. It is the mark of chronic inflammation, the kind that can progress toward fibrosis. Don't let the cough sense mislead you. There, productive means bringing material out of the body; here, it means making new tissue in place.

  7. 7
    adjective
    Of a set of natural numbers: such that a total recursive function can always produce a member of the set lying outside any recursively enumerable subset.

    The set of Gödel numbers of true arithmetic sentences is productive.

    Every productive set fails to be recursively enumerable.

    Note

    A computability theorist's term for a set too rich to be listed. No recursively enumerable subset can exhaust it, because a total recursive function always returns a member that the subset missed. For that reason productive sets are never recursively enumerable themselves, and they turn up in proofs of incompleteness. The usual phrase is simply "a productive set."

Practice

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Origin

Borrowed from Late Latin "productivus," equivalent to "product" plus the suffix "-ive."