Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- adj. Tending to cleanse or purge, especially causing evacuation of the bowels.
- n. A purgative agent or medicine; a cathartic.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- Having the power of cleansing; usually, having the power of evacuating the intestines; cathartic.
- Having the property, as judicial torture in some cases, of invalidating the evidence against an accused person, when he, under torture, satisfactorily answered the questions of the judges.
- n. A medicine that evacuates the intestines, producing more or less abundant and watery stools.
Wiktionary
GNU Webster's 1913
- adj. Having the power or quality of purging; cathartic.
WordNet 3.0
- n. a purging medicine; stimulates evacuation of the bowels
- adj. strongly laxative
Examples
“Mystical theology is generally divided into three parts, respectively called the purgative, the illuminative, and the unitive life.”
“These states are also described as the purgative, illuminative, and unitive ways.”
“There are a great many men, even amongst the wisest and strongest of us, who benefit every year of their lives by what might be called the purgative function of literature, -- men who, if they did not have a chance at the right moment to commit certain sins with their imaginary selves, would commit them with their real ones.”
“The great value of the oil as a purgative is the mildness and rapidity with”
“Of the three ways leading to perfection the first is called the purgative, and consists in the purifying of the soul; from which, as from a piece of waste ground, we must take away the brambles and thorns of sin before planting there trees which shall bear good fruit.”
“A general idea of the "Exercises" may best be gained from Diertins's summary: After setting forth the end for which God created man and all other things, the book, ever considering this truth as the first foundation, leads us in a short time by the way known as the purgative way to acknowledge the ugliness of the sins which have caused us to stray shamefully from the end, and to cleanse our souls from sin.”
“More than 11.16 billion shares changed hands on the NYSE Composite, record volume -- the kind of purgative selling that some bulls were waiting to see.”
The Wall Street Journal: Dow Jones Industrials Lost 18% in Their Worst Week Ever
“Gustave Colline, who had for a long time past been in intimate relations with a waistcoat maker, whom he was rendering deformed in mind and body by obliging her to sit day and night copying the manuscripts of his philosophical works, asserted that love was a kind of purgative, good to take at the beginning of each season in order to get rid of humors.”
“Virtue, however, in the full Christian sense of the term, is only possible as we journey through the "purgative" way of the interior life and into what the mystical tradition calls the "illuminative" and "unitive" ways.”
“purgative" stage, nor of any ultimate experience of ecstasy; it is simply -- if one may so put it -- a narrative of certain intimate talks with”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘purgative’.
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Shakespeare.03
kinsman, bruit, purgative, sundry, largess, barefaced, carouse, valiant, auger, verity, weal, battlement and 2 more...
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Drugs
Takes 12-15 years and $800 million to bring a drug to the market. For every 10,000 compounds that go through animal studies, 10 will go to human trials (3 phases) to get 1 to the market.
In g...ephedrine, penicillin, librium, tetracycline, xenobiotic, teratogenic, labile sites, cholinergic, prostaglandin, patient compliance, GABA, barbiturates and 72 more...
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the first list
an immense, grandiloquent list that loads like a thousand years sentence in stone. new words are in the other lists.
ridiculous, brummagem, predicament, sanctimonious, vapid, eschew, admonish, auspicious, capitulation, enumerate, lachrymose, tenet and 1648 more...
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aliko's Words
deli, turkey, bodrum, deniz, sunny, seks, tatil, hava, zeeman, captain, kapitein, kaptan and 256 more...
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colleen's words ii
sibilant, sundry, spindle, distaff, device, mortar, pestle, scythe, flail, thresh, frown, elementary and 495 more...
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No Comeuppance!
comeuppance, ersatz, mensuration, felicitous, puissant, coccyx, groin vault, jactitation, titivate, crapulous, bibulous, lucubration and 116 more...
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Words I should know
Words found in vocabulary lists that I don't really know or haven't heard before. Removed when I see them in a sentence somewhere. Moved to "Words I've learned just now" if I didn't recognize it ...
moiety, abrogate, abstemious, acumen, bowdlerize, enervate, expurgate, gauche, hegemony, inculcate, jejune, quasar and 45 more...
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Vintage Physic
Words that relate to the history of western medicine!
chymist, apothecary, purgative, scarificator, leech, humour, barber, phrenology, trepanning, alienism, hysteria, nostrum and 1 more...
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While Europe Slept/America Alone/Amer...
Words gathered during my recent "current affairs" reading bender.
It's not an addiction, I can quit any time I want.proforma, distaff, senescent, simplisme, arrondissement, brasserie, cynosure, entente, inure, elision, contrariety, calumny and 53 more...
Tweets
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