Definitions
from The Century Dictionary.
- Causing or tending to cause reversal.
- Reverting; tending toward reversion; specifically, in biology, returning or tending to return to an ancestral or original type; reversionary; atavic.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- adjective linguistics Designating the
reversion of an action.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- adjective tending to be turned back
Etymologies
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Examples
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It was rather hard on humanity, and rather reversive of Providence, that all this care and pains should be lavished on cats and dogs, while little morsels of flesh and blood, ragged, hungry, and immortal, wandered up and down the streets.
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 08, No. 46, August, 1861 Various
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It included a letter from Loring, and there was another reversive upheaval for the exile.
The Grafters Francis Lynde 1893
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Until you have done this let men fend for themselves in rough outsides a little longer; except, perhaps, as wise, able women whom the trying transition time calls forth may find fit way and place for effort and protest -- there is always room for that, and noble work has been and is being done; but do not rear a new generation of women to expect and desire charges and responsibilities reversive of their own life-law, through whose perfect fulfillment alone may the future clean place be made for all to work in.
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Bomis I reversive slackened at the speeches of the Avocat-general, COOSENING who sets up the odious ostentationes of the nobility and clergy against the strages and d’avesnes of the exasperate; I should la
Whoring again… 2005
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