OED Online Word of the Day
Now with the Historical Thesaurus, new design, new words, and new revisions. Find out more...
Your word for today is: creative, adj.
creative, adj.
Pronunciation: Brit. /krɪˈeɪtɪv/, U.S. /kriˈeɪdɪv/
Forms: 15–16 creatiue, 16– creative.
Etymology: < post-classical Latin creativus (frequently from 12th cent.; from 14th cent. in British sources) < classical Latin creāt-, past participial stem of creārecreate v. + -īvus-ive suffix. Compare Middle French creatif, French créatif (15th cent.), Spanish creativo (15th cent.), Italian creativo (15th cent.).
1.
a. Having the quality of creating, able to create; of or relating to creation; originative.
a1513 J. Irland Meroure of Wyssdome (1965) II. 89Infinit perfeccioun in him the power creatiue.
1612 R. Sheldon 1st Serm. after Conversion 35What new existencies are made of one Christ, by your productiue, creatiue, and factiue consecrations.
1625 T. Jackson Treat. Originall of Unbeliefe iv. 20Others‥imagine two eternall indefectible creatiue powers; the one good, and sole fountaine of all goodnesse: the other evill, and maine souse of all evill and mischiefe in the world.
1678 R. Cudworth True Intellect. Syst. Universe i. v. 863This Divine Miraculous Creative Power.
1728 D. Mallet Excursion 9Fancy, creative Power, at whose Command Arise unnumber'd Images of Things, Thy hourly Offspring.
c1750 W. Shenstone Ruin'd Abbey 332Heav'n's creative hand.
1847 C. Brontë Let. ?21 Apr. (1995) I. 523Your creative fingers will turn it to better account than my destructive ones.
1874 J. R. Green Short Hist. Eng. People iv. 164There is no trace of creative genius or originality in his character.
1921 Sci. Monthly Feb. 116Avicenna‥thought fossils were the unfinished work of vis plastica, a creative force that changed inorganic substances to organic.
1937 'G. Orwell' Road to Wigan Pier xii. 230In my spare time I want to do something 'creative', so I choose to do a bit of carpentering.
1992 Sci. Amer. May 57/1,I went to China and found that a quarter of the human race doesn't find the need of believing in a benevolent and creative god.
b. Inventive, imaginative; of, relating to, displaying, using, or involving imagination or original ideas as well as routine skill or intellect, esp. in literature or art. Cf. creative writer n., creative writing n. at Special uses.
1729 R. Savage Wanderer 3Come, contemplation,‥Whose Pencil paints, obsequious to thy Will, All thou survey'st, with a creative Skill!
1791 J. Ireland Hogarth Illustr. II. 332He carries in his countenance a perfect consciousness of his talents in this creative art.
1816 Wordsworth Ode Gen. Thanksgiving 30Creative Art‥Demands the service of a mind and heart‥Heroically fashioned.
1876 'G. Eliot' Daniel Deronda II. iii. xxii. 73A creative artist is no more a mere musician than a great statesman is a mere politician.
1900 W. B. Worsfold Judgm. in Lit. iii. 25Aristotle has once and for all characterised the method of creative literature, and distinguished such literature from all other branches of letters.
1958 Spectator 14 Feb. 197/1'Creative' commercial jobs, such as advertising, designing, modelling, public relations, TV production, or on a 'glossy' news-magazine.
1969 Times 13 Dec. 9/7Middleclass mothers who leave a child alone with a roomful of creative toys all day may produce 'C' stream children as often as the working mother.
1990 Times Educ. Suppl. 1 June a6/2A new performing arts centre will be set up in September, involving creative music making.
c. Esp. of a financial or other strategy: ingenious, esp. in a misleading way. Recorded earliest in creative accounting n. at Special uses.
1967 M. Brooks Producers (screenplay) 20Bialystock: How could a producer make more money with a flop than with a hit?‥ Bloom: It's simply a matter of creative accounting.
1979 Economist 7 July 91/2The purpose of unitary taxation is ostensibly to capture income which might otherwise, through creative transfer pricing, go untaxed or undertaxed in other jurisdictions.
1985 Dirt Bike Mar. 9/1 (advt.)Our competitors claim 'Number 1 this', 'Fastest growing that'‥. We have but a single response to all this 'creative' ad copy—Nonsense!
1996 H. K. Smith Events leading up to my Death lxii. 295Kennedy came out on top, but his victory margin was so thin and was obtained under such dubious conditions in two states famous for creative vote counting that the opposite result may have been the true one.
2. Providing the cause or occasion of, productive of. Now rare.
1701 S. Hill Rights, Liberties, & Authorities of Christian Church ii. 17Not only concessive of Liberty, but creative of all Authority.
1795 A. Thomas Newfoundland Jrnl. 4 Feb. (1968) 206,I wrote with the quill of a Goose. A simple Animal. Therefore all my subjects are flat, mucid, rough, heavy and creative of lethargy.
1803 Med. Jrnl. 9 272Injuries‥unattended by any symptoms creative of alarm.
1837 H. Martineau Society in Amer. III. 130Laws and customs cannot be creative of virtue: they may encourage and help to preserve it; but they cannot originate it.
1904 Proc. Amer. Polit. Sci. Assoc. 1 130The true activity of the government is not creative of social action but liberative of social forces.
1975 Times 5 Feb. 17/4He lifted up the loss of his eyes, in bounden duty and service, day by day for nearly 60 of his 77 years of life‥. That living sacrifice was accepted and made creative of great good.
Special uses
creative accountancy n. = creative accounting n.
1981 Washington Post 12 Mar. c2/1Congress has not approved Carter's or Reagan's budget, so the data in them represent a certain amount of '*creative accountancy'.
2007 Daily Tel. (Nexis) 28 Mar. 2Eric Pickles, the Conservative spokesman, said: 'Labour spin doctors are again using creative accountancy to hide the fact that their councils cost more and deliver less.'
creative accountant n. a person who practises creative accounting.
1973 New Yorker 20 Aug. 39/3Losses, then, of three hundred billion dollars in a year or a half, spread over more than thirty million investors—such were the bitter fruits‥of the works of corporate fiction written by the '*creative' accountants, who found ways of justifying fanciful figures on their clients' earnings statements.
2005 Chillicothe (Missouri) Constit.-Tribune (Nexis) 16 June 5/4He and some creative accountants schemed and scammed the company into bankruptcy.
creative accounting n. the modification of accounts to achieve a desired end; falsification of accounts that is misleading but not necessarily illegal.
1967Creative accounting [see sense 1c].
1986 Tribune 12 Sept. 3/2The working party on local government finance will look first at the extent of creative accounting, particularly deferred purchase schemes, which councils have used to get round government restrictions.
2008 Sunday Times (Nexis) 31 Aug. 4Creative accounting to take advantage of low tax rates means that productivity estimates for these firms are greatly exaggerated.
creative class n. creative people collectively; people working in fields such as the arts, publishing, design, etc., considered as a class.
1836 Amer. Q. Rev. June 429If he [sc. a writer] do indeed belong to that *creative class, who make the world they inhabit, what need has he of calling for more ground?
1936 Times 9 June 12The individual‥who views familiar vistas from a new angle—'tis he who is of the creative class.
2005 D. McWilliams Pope's Children ii. 18It [sc. the educational uplift] has already led to the emergence of a new creative class.
creative destruction n. the process by which something is replaced, and thus effectively destroyed, by something newly created; (Econ.) the process by which emerging technologies, industries, and ideas in capitalist economies continuously supplant existing ones, identified by Joseph Schumpeter in 1942; freq. in gale of creative destruction.
1927 H. J. Laski Communism ii. 57Its utility for its age draws near completion; its antithesis then begins the work of *creative destruction.
1942 J. A. Schumpeter Capitalism, Socialism & Democracy vii. 84It must be seen in its role in the perennial gale of creative destruction.
1981 Philos. & Phenomenol. Res. 42 106It is‥a creative destruction. The substitution for the destroyed Oedipus complex is the boy's formation within himself of a father-like self-critical agency.
2001 P. Anton et al. Global Technol. Revol. Summary p. xvi,The accelerating pace of technological change combined with 'creative destruction' of industries will increase the importance of continued education and learning.
creative director n. a person who oversees the creative elements or overall design of an organization's advertising, products, publications, etc. (freq. as a job title).
1938 N.Y. Times 10 Jan. 30/3S. K. Wilson, *creative director of Erwin, Wasey & Co., Ltd., [sc. an advertising agency], London, for the last two years.
1966 Crisis June–July 332/2Mr. Read is creative director of the Department of Supporting Services of the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A.
2005 Daily Tel 26 Apr. 19/1Since Tomas Maier took over as creative director of Bottega Veneta four years ago, the butterfly has been the label′s emblem, and has appeared as a signature print on his ultra-luxe bags.
creative evolution n. [after French L'Évolution créatrice (title of book by H. L. Bergson, 1907)] (in the philosophy of Henri Bergson) continuous change and development, conceived as an inherent property of the universe.
1908 Jrnl. Philos., Psychol. & Sci. Methods 5 606The active principle of life Bergson describes by the phrase tendency to create. Its movement is a *creative evolution.
1921 G. B. Shaw Back to Methuselah p. lxxviii,Creative Evolution is already a religion, and is indeed now unmistakably the religion of the twentieth century.
1981 E. R. Harrison Cosmology xx. 395/2In Bergson's theory of creative evolution the world of material things is orderly and deterministic, whereas the élan vital, the breath of life, is creative and free.
2001 Slavic & East European Jrnl. 45 321Kazantzakis's profound interest in the idea of creative evolution, espoused by his teacher Henri Bergson, accounts for his attraction to, but ultimate desire to transcend, communism.
creative evolutionist n. an adherent of Bergson's concept of creative evolution.
1915 Jrnl. Philos., Psychol. & Sci. Methods 12 373,I am myself certainly no Kantian, or at least no more Kantian than pragmatist, *creative evolutionist, or anything else you please.
1969 R. Boxill Shaw & Doctors ii. 50The mechanism of the Neo-Darwinians could not be established any more than the vitalism of the creative evolutionists.
creative sentencing n. Law (orig. and chiefly U.S.) the passing of an (often unorthodox or innovative) sentence as an alternative to imprisonment, esp. with the aim of linking the punishment to the crime committed; esp. a sentence which causes the offender to face the consequences of his or her actions or to make some form of retribution.
1975 Pacific Reporter 543 413/1We are not unaware of the fact that the sentence review process has the potential of stifling *creative sentencing. This must not happen; appellate review must insure the quality of justice, not diminish it.
1982 N.Y. Times 6 June xi. 25We urge judges to consider other creative sentencing options on a case-by-case basis, with jail always available as a last resort when other punishments fail.
2001 Sunday Mail (Glasgow) (Nexis) 28 Oct.,At his court in‥Ohio, Judge Hostetler said the overcrowded jail forced creative sentencing. He once made vandals‥auction their possessions to pay for the damage.
creative writer n. a person who engages in creative writing.
[1839 Edinb. Rev. Jan. 370[Southey] is really an original and a creative writer.]
1854 Gentleman's Mag. Sept. 231This deficiency places him [sc. Alexandre Dumas], in our opinion at least, immeasurably below his rival, M. Eugene Sue, in the scale of *creative writers.
1907 G. K. Chesterton in Dickens Pickwick Papers p. viii,In creative art the essence of a book exists before the book.‥ The creative writer laughs at his comedy before he creates it.
1938 W. S. Maugham Summing Up 232One of the reasons why current criticism is so useless is that it is done as a side-issue by creative writers.
2004 Times Lit. Suppl. 23 Apr. 26/3A few lucky individuals received a liberal education and went on to be creative writers‥or‥became the hostesses of literary salons.
creative writing n. writing which displays imagination or invention (sometimes differentiated from academic, journalistic, or other forms of writing which are more constrained in style or scope); also freq. (orig. U.S.) as a subject of study.
1837 R. W. Emerson Oration before Phi Beta Kappa Soc. 11One must be an inventor to read well.‥ There is then creative reading, as well as *creative writing.
1889 Dial Sept. 94/1Does it in truth rest entirely, or even mainly, with the reviewer‥to elevate criticism to its rightful place, very near to creative writing itself?
1922 R. C. Holliday & A. Van Rensselaer Business of Writing 100Then, actually, there is comparatively small demand for creative writing.
1930 Eng. Jrnl. 19 635Courses in creative writing.
1958 Oxf. Mag. 4 Dec. 164/2In America‥established, or at any rate committed, writers have been absorbed, permanently or temporarily, into the apparatus of creative writing workshops.
1991 Nation (N.Y.) 23 Sept. 338/1The school's small rooms were alive with activity—hands-on use of scientific and mathematical materials and lots of creative writing and art work.
To cancel this service, send a message to wotd@oed.com consisting of the text signoff oedwotd-l and leave the subject line blank . Alternatively, use this unsubscribe mail link.
Written requests to unsubscribe may be sent to:
Online ProductsOxford University Press
Great Clarendon Street
Oxford OX2 6DP
UK
Visit the OED's home page at www.oed.com
Copyright © Oxford University Press 2010
Oxford University Press (UK) Disclaimer
This message is confidential. You should not copy it or disclose its contents to anyone. You may use and apply the information for the intended purpose only. OUP does not accept legal responsibility for the contents of this message. Any views or opinions presented are those of the author only and not of OUP. If this email has come to you in error, please delete it, along with any attachments. Please note that OUP may intercept incoming and outgoing email communications.
Oxford University Press (UK) Disclaimer
This message is confidential. You should not copy it or disclose its contents to anyone. You may use and apply the information for the intended purpose only. OUP does not accept legal responsibility for the contents of this message. Any views or opinions presented are those of the author only and not of OUP. If this email has come to you in error, please delete it, along with any attachments. Please note that OUP may intercept incoming and outgoing email communications.
No comments:
Post a Comment