creative
/kriˈeɪtɪv/adjective, noun
Able to invent or produce original ideas
From Latin create (To make).
Lineage
create
-ive
The story
At first glance, creative sounds like a tidy modern compliment, but its oldest ingredient is a Latin verb, creō, meaning “make” or “bring forth”—even “beget.” Roman ears could therefore hear creation as something closer to causing life or growth than merely having a clever idea. The adjective arrived in English in the 1670s, but its artistic glow came later: Wordsworth helped establish creative as “imaginative” in 1816, and creative writing appears by 1848. Its suffix, -ive, is a linguistic little machine that turns actions into tendencies: create becomes “having a habit or power of creating.” The same Latin family also reaches toward crescere, “to grow,” and Ceres, the goddess whose name survives in cereal—so a creative person is, etymologically speaking, someone who makes things grow. Think of creative as “the growing-making one”: not just an inventor, but a cultivator of possibilities.
Modern usage
A person whose work or identity centers on producing original ideas or art
- Heard in
- creative professions · art and design · online creator culture
- See
- Steve Martin is a true creative
Words from the same roots
create · Latin, ‘To make, bring forth, produce, or bring into being’
-ive · Latin, ‘Pertaining to, tending to, or serving to do’
Derivedaggressive, argumentative, frequentative, productive