Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • adjective Reducing pain or severity; palliative.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • Tending to alleviate or mitigate.
  • noun That which alleviates or mitigates: as, “some cheering alleviative,”

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • adjective Tending to alleviate.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • adjective That alleviates pain; palliative
  • noun That which alleviates; a drug or remedy.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • adjective moderating pain or sorrow by making it easier to bear

Etymologies

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Examples

  • "Dagger Flower," contains chemically an "oleo-resin," which is purgative to the liver in material doses, and specially alleviative against bilious sickness when taken of much reduced strength by reason of its acting as a similar.

    Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure William Thomas Fernie

  • _ "I have been bronchitic and asthmatic for twenty years, and have never known an alleviative so immediately efficacious as 'Anisette.'"

    Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure William Thomas Fernie

  • When the most powerful alleviative known to medical science has bestowed the last Judas kiss which is necessary to emasculate its victim, and, sure of the prey, substitutes stabbing for blandishment, what alleviative, stronger than the strongest, shall soothe such doom?

    The Opium Habit Horace B. Day

  • I request that if he has brought any form of opium with him he will give it to me, and we enter into a stipulation that he will come to me for any opiate or other alleviative which he may desire.

    The Opium Habit Horace B. Day

  • Also they had been promised a solution of the noise mystery and was not that in itself sufficient alleviative?

    Jane Allen, Junior Edith Bancroft

  • Aunt Helen and grannie put me to bed, where I yelled with pain for hours like a mad Red Indian, despite their applying every alleviative possible.

    My Brilliant Career Miles Franklin 1916

  • No song, no dance, no tobacco, no liquor, no alleviative of life -- only toil and church - going; so says a voice from his face; and the face is the face of the Polynesian Esau, but the voice is the voice of a Jacob from a different world.

    In the South Seas Robert Louis Stevenson 1872

  • I should deny such a plain fact -- of selecter spirits to do purely secular alleviative work, with an entire ignoring of Christian motives, but you will never get the army of workers that is needed to grapple with the facts of our present condition, unless you touch the very deepest springs of conduct, and these are to be found in communion with God.

    Expositions of Holy Scripture Second Kings Chapters VIII to End and Chronicles, Ezra, and Nehemiah. Esther, Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes Alexander Maclaren 1868

  • The holders of the reserve have, therefore, to treat two opposite maladies at once -- one requiring stringent remedies, and especially a rapid rise in the rate of interest; and the other, an alleviative treatment with large and ready loans.

    Lombard Street : a description of the money market Walter Bagehot 1851

  • Notably, John F. Kennedy took medicine cabinets of alleviative medications for back pain, among other problems.

    The Washington Post: National, World & D.C. Area News and Headlines - The Washington Post Kathleen Parker 2011

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