Informative

How to spell informative

11 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce informative

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does informative mean?

1. adjectiveProviding useful or instructive knowledge.

Informative in a sentence

• The museum guide gave an informative talk about the exhibits.

• She found the training session genuinely informative and well organised.

Where does informative come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This adjective traces back to the Latin verb informare, which literally meant 'to give shape to' or 'to form', built from in- 'into' and forma 'shape' or 'form'. In medieval Latin the sense broadened from physically shaping something to shaping the mind by instructing it, so to inform a person was to furnish their understanding with knowledge. English picked up 'inform' through Old French in the 1300s, and the adjective 'informative', meaning 'giving useful knowledge', followed by the late 1400s. The same forma root underlies a large family of everyday words such as 'form', 'format', 'reform' and 'uniform'. Remembering that the core is plain 'form' helps fix the spelling, since the trap is really just the unstressed -mative ending rather than anything exotic.

How the word is built

• in- (into)
• form (shape)
• -ative (tending to, adjective suffix)