submissive

Pluralsubmissives

1. 1
   adjective

   Meekly obedient or passive, and overly eager to please or defer to others.

   Years of harsh discipline had left the recruits submissive and afraid to question orders.

   Critics say the board is too submissive to the company's founder to challenge any of her plans.

   Similarmeek, docile, compliant, obedient, deferential

   Oppositeassertive, defiant, dominant, rebellious

   Note

   The adjective takes to before whatever is deferred to: Edmund Burke in 1756 writes of managers not sufficiently submissive to those who held personal favor. Thorndike's Educational Psychology (1913) treats it as a posture as much as an attitude: lowered head and shoulders, a wavering glance, slackened muscles. That bodily picture is why the word rarely sounds like praise; obedience can be chosen, but submissiveness reads as something imposed or settled into.

2. 2
   nouncountable

   In BDSM, a person who submits to a dominating partner.

   A submissive in a healthy arrangement can stop everything with a single safe word.

   The workshop taught dominants and submissives how to talk through their limits before anything begins.

   Similarsub

   Oppositedominant, dom, dominatrix

   Note

   A term from BDSM, where the role is chosen and agreed within limits rather than imposed; that consent is what separates it from the meek, obedient adjective. In the community it is often shortened to sub, and the partner opposite is the dominant or dom, or a dominatrix when that partner is a woman.

3. 3
   nounrarecountable

   A person who submits to the authority or control of another.

   The settlers left the submissives in peace but hunted down the bands that kept resisting.

   These "submissives" continued to go along as near as possible following the old routine of their lives and did no overt act to annoy any of the parties of whites that persisted in traveling through their country.

   1961, William Compton Brown, The Indian side of the story

   Note

   The general noun is rare, and it turns up in history writing for people who yielded to a stronger power instead of resisting. William Compton Brown's The Indian side of the story (1961) puts "submissives" in quotation marks for those who kept to their old routines and gave the parties of whites traveling through no trouble. A reader today is likelier to hear the BDSM role, so the context has to carry this meaning.

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