# productive

Pronunciation: US say "pruh-DUK-tiv" /pɹəˈdʌk.tɪv/; UK

## Adjective

1. Yielding good or useful results; helpful and constructive.
   - Simple: Bringing good, useful results from the time or effort you put in.
   - _The negotiations proved productive, ending in a signed agreement._
   - _He spent a productive afternoon clearing his backlog of emails._
2. Able to make or grow something, especially in large quantities.
   - Simple: Able to make or grow a lot of something.
   - _The region's productive farmland feeds millions of people._
   - _These fishing grounds remain productive despite heavy use._
3. Relating to the activity of turning out goods or supplying services in an economy.
   - Simple: Having to do with making goods or providing services.
   - _Economists distinguish productive sectors from those that merely move money around._
   - _The country rebuilt its productive capacity after the war._
4. In medicine, used of a cough that clears mucus or sputum out of the respiratory tract.
   - Simple: Describing a cough that brings up mucus from the lungs or airways.
   - _The patient presented with a productive cough lasting over two weeks._
   - _Clinicians note whether a cough is productive before choosing treatment._
5. Able to be applied consistently to any word in an open, expandable set.
   - Simple: Able to be added to many words to make new ones.
   - _The suffix '-able' remains highly productive in modern English._
   - _Productive affixes let speakers coin words that listeners instantly understand._
6. Of inflammation: producing new tissue.
   - Simple: Describing inflammation that makes new tissue grow as the body heals.
   - _Chronic infection can lead to productive inflammation in the surrounding tissue._
   - _Pathologists noted productive inflammation around the implant._
7. 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.
   - Simple: In math, a kind of number set that no single rule can fully list.
   - _The set of Gödel numbers of true arithmetic sentences is productive._
   - _Every productive set fails to be recursively enumerable._

## Origin

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

Source: DictionaryAI, https://dictionaryai.com/define/productive (written from Wiktionary data, CC BY-SA 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).