Obsessive

How to spell obsessive

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce obsessive

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does obsessive mean?

1. adjectivePreoccupied with something to an excessive or unhealthy degree.
2. nounA person who is dominated by a fixed idea or compulsive behaviour.

Obsessive in a sentence

• adjective

  His obsessive checking of the locks made him late for work every morning.

• noun

  As a self-confessed obsessive, he reorganised his entire spice rack alphabetically.

• adjective

  She kept obsessive records of every penny the household spent.

• noun

  The support group welcomed every kind of obsessive who struggled with repetitive rituals.

Where does obsessive come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb obsidere, meaning literally 'to sit before' or 'to besiege', formed from ob- ('against, toward') and sedere ('to sit'). A besieging army quite literally sat down in front of a fortified town until it surrendered, and from that image of relentless, encircling pressure the past participle obsessus gave rise to the idea of being hemmed in or mentally besieged. English took 'obsess' in the early sixteenth century with the sense of an evil spirit or fixed idea besieging the mind, and the adjective 'obsessive' followed much later, becoming common in psychological writing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The same sedere root sits quietly inside everyday words such as 'session', 'sediment', and 'reside', which all share the notion of sitting or settling. The spelling trap is the doubled s in the middle (-sess-), an echo of the Latin obsessus that writers often reduce to a single s.

How the word is built

• ob- (against, toward)
• sess (from Latin sedere: to sit)
• -ive (adjective-forming suffix)