Interactive

How to spell interactive

11 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce interactive

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does interactive mean?

1. adjectiveAllowing or involving a two-way flow of information or action, especially between a person and a computer or between participants.

Interactive in a sentence

• The museum installed an interactive display that responds to visitors' gestures.

• The training course is fully interactive, with quizzes after every module.

Where does interactive come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word is built from the Latin prefix inter-, meaning 'between' or 'among', joined to the root act, which traces back to the Latin verb agere, meaning 'to do, drive, or set in motion'. The verb 'interact' was assembled in English in the early 1800s to describe two or more things acting upon one another. The adjective 'interactive' followed soon after, originally describing any mutual or reciprocal action between people or forces. With the rise of computing in the mid-twentieth century the word took on its now-dominant sense of a system that responds to user input in real time. The same agere root gives us a large family of relatives, including 'agent', 'agile', 'react', and 'transaction', and noticing the clean inter + act + ive split is the easiest way to keep the spelling straight.

How the word is built

• inter- (between/among)
• act (from Latin agere: to do, drive)
• -ive (adjective suffix)