Did you by any chance mean simulative?
Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- adj. Of or relating to a linguistic form or construction that expresses a singular entity, often as opposed to a collective, such as rice-grain as opposed to rice.
- n. A singulative form or construction.
Wiktionary
- adj. grammar Of or pertaining to a grammatical form or construction that expresses the individuation of a single referent from a mass noun.
- n. grammar A singulative form or construction.
Etymologies
- From French singulatif, from Latin singillatim ("singly", "one by one"), from singulus ("single", "separate"), from simplex ("simple", "single"), from Proto-Indo-European *sem- (“one, together”). (Wiktionary)
- French singulatif, from Latin singillātim, singulātim, one at a time, singly, from singulus, single; see single. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
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Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘singulative’.
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wot, no?
miscellaneous words that weren't here till I added them
iraimbilanja, luma, lwei, emalangeni, laari, sene, maloti, lisente, ekuele, bipkwele, renegue, chaource and 123 more...
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the catch-all
inveigle, frontier, invective, quizzical, merit, proficiency, eleemosynary, ham-handed, circumspect, epergne, cobble, industriousness and 201 more...
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Adjectival Arcana
A roster of adjectives that infrequently surface in typical conversation and writing. Many are dredged from scientific or other technical jargon or sieved from examples of disused archaic forms.
unitegmic, acaulescent, reticuloendothelial, ingressive, uniate, acanthopterygian, ossific, epiphysial, perivisceral, acœlomatous, cestoid, acælomate and 7756 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for singulative.
rolig This reminds me of Russian, where vegetables are often identified as grammatically singular mass nouns: морковь / morkov' means "carrots", while морковка / morkovka means "a carrot"; горох / gorokh "peas", but горошинка / goroshinka "a pea". In both these (and, I think, other) cases, the singulative is formed with a diminutive suffix. Jun 18, 2009
dimã©lion this does look simply like a bastardisation of suffixes, at first glance. thank you! i'm glad you're furthering my education. no sarcasm intended. Jun 18, 2009
qroqqa I virtually never click on those little icons that go to what are claimed to be dictionaries; but I did for this and was disappointed in the results (predictably). The examples cited were from English, which has no true singulatives: snowflake and rice-grain are more just translations of the kind of thing that a singulative would be.
They occur commonly in Welsh and Arabic, where the mass form is morphologically simpler than the singulative, e.g. Welsh adar "birds", aderyn "bird", or Arabic ward "flowers", wardah "flower". Jun 18, 2009