Investigative

How to spell investigative

13 letters · 5 syllables

How to pronounce investigative

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does investigative mean?

1. adjectiveRelating to or involving careful, systematic inquiry to uncover facts.

Investigative in a sentence

• The newspaper ran a lengthy investigative report on the bank's hidden fees.

• Her investigative skills made her the obvious choice to lead the fraud inquiry.

Where does investigative come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb investigare, meaning 'to track down' or 'to search into', which was built from the prefix in- ('into') and vestigare ('to follow a trail'). That verb in turn rests on the noun vestigium, which literally meant 'a footprint' or 'a trace', so to investigate something was originally to follow its footprints. English took the verb 'investigate' from Latin in the early sixteenth century, and the adjective 'investigative', describing the act or tendency of inquiring closely, followed later. The same vestigium root survives in the everyday word 'vestige', meaning a faint surviving trace of something. Keeping that buried 'vestig' in mind helps with the spelling, since the trap lies in the unstressed middle vowels: it is investi-GAT-ive, with an 'i' after the 'invest' and an 'a' in the '-gat-' before the '-ive' ending.

How the word is built

• in- (into)
• vestig- (track, trace, from vestigium 'footprint')
• -ative (adjective suffix denoting a tendency)