FORMATIVE • DICTIONARY ONE.COM • Definition of Formative

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/fˈɔrmətɪv/ Listen

Formative

adjective

Capable of forming new cells and tissues.

Forming or capable of forming or molding or fashioning. Synonyms: plastic, shaping. "A formative experience"

noun

Minimal language unit that has a syntactic (or morphological) function.

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Etymology of 'Formative'

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"Formative" Quotes from Famous Books

... the Western Union. The longer he remained, the less he liked its atmosphere. And the closer his contact with Jay Gould the more doubtful he became of the wisdom of such an association and perhaps its unconscious influence upon his own life in its formative period. ...

— A Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward Bok

... variety had been grafted, threw out a variegated leaved shoot below the graft. This can easily be explained. The growth of the trunk or stem of all exogenous plants, or those which increase in size on the outside of the stem, is brought about by the descent of certain formative tissue called cambium, elaborated by the leaves and descending between the old wood and the bark, where it is formed into alburnum or woody matter. Some think that it is also formed by the roots and ascends from them as well as descending from the leaves. Be this ...

— Scientific American, Volume XLIII., No. 25, December 18, 1880 • Various

... teaching, including his own voluminous writings, and the innumerable controversies in which he was engaged throughout his life. I have not discovered in all this mass of material a single trace of Jewish influence. He had no Jewish friends or associates during the formative years, the period in which the Socialist ideas and ideals shaped themselves. His Socialism was the direct outcome of his experience as a successful manufacturer. He was not in any sense a man of books. From time to time he ...

— The Jew and American Ideals • John Spargo

... human attributes cannot possibly go astray. There {258} is thus a zone of insecurity in human affairs in which all the dramatic interest lies; the rest belongs to the dead machinery of the stage. This is the formative zone, the part not yet ingrained into the race's average, not yet a typical, hereditary, and constant factor of the social community in which it occurs. It is like the soft layer beneath the bark of the tree in which all the year's growth is going ...

— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James

... during the formative state of the army, and when the colonies were in a state of anarchy. Congress had not yet assumed control of the army, although on the very eve of it. With an empire to found and defend, the continental Congress had ...

— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean

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