Definitions

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

  • noun A substance added in small amounts to something else to improve, strengthen, or otherwise alter it.
  • adjective Marked by, produced by, or involving addition.
  • adjective Of or being any of certain primary colors of wavelengths that may be mixed with one another to produce other colors.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • To be added; of the nature of an addition; helping to increase: as, an additive correction (a correction to be added).

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

  • adjective (Math.) Proper to be added; positive; -- opposed to subtractive.

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

  • adjective mathematics Pertaining to addition; that can be, or has been, added.
  • adjective mathematics, of a function, etc. Distributive over addition.
  • adjective algebra Having addition as an operator.
  • adjective chemistry Pertaining to chemical addition.
  • adjective genetics Describing genes (or the interaction etc. of such genes) which govern the same trait and whose effects work together on the phenotype.
  • noun A substance added to another substance or product for its ability to alter its properties.

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

  • adjective characterized or produced by addition
  • adjective designating or involving an equation whose terms are of the first degree
  • noun something added to enhance food or gasoline or paint or medicine

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Late Latin additivus, from the participial stem of Latin addere ("to add").

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Examples

  • The term additive combinatorics is also used; however, the sets A being studied need not be sets of integers, but rather subsets of non-commutative groups, for which the multiplication symbol, not the addition symbol, is traditionally used; they can also be subsets of Probabilistic number theory

    Citizendium, the Citizens' Compendium - Recent changes [en] 2009

  • These are what we call additive colours, which have a different colour wheel all together composed of Red,

    Apartment Therapy Main 2010

  • Supporting local merchants that specialize in additive free fish and local poultry such as the Erickson family makes not only a lot of sense but it is an investment in keeping this great tradition alive and well in our city.

    Shop! 2006

  • Supporting local merchants that specialize in additive free fish and local poultry such as the Erickson family makes not only a lot of sense but it is an investment in keeping this great tradition alive and well in our city.

    Seattle Bon Vivant: 2005

  • GE.N, are ready to try the opposite approach, building parts for heavy equipment from jet engines to ultrasound machines through a layer-by-layer process they call "additive manufacturing."

    Reuters: Press Release 2011

  • are ready to try the opposite approach, building parts for heavy equipment from jet engines to ultrasound machines through a layer-by-layer process they call "additive manufacturing."

    The Full Feed from HuffingtonPost.com The Huffington Post News Editors 2011

  • I enjoy reading the differences between so-called additive and subtractive systems.

    The Color Wheel, Part 2 James Gurney 2010

  • If you shine a red light and a green light and a blue light together at something it produces white light as those in stage lighting I would presume would know, that's why it's called additive color.

    The Color Wheel, Part 7 James Gurney 2010

  • Perhaps if we called it by its other name of "sodium bicarbonate," people would fear this common food additive, which is in fact, a chemical compound.

    Archive 2009-05-01 2009

  • Perhaps if we called it by its other name of "sodium bicarbonate," people would fear this common food additive, which is in fact, a chemical compound.

    INFO: Skeptical Eating 2009

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