Preventive

How to spell preventive

10 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce preventive

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does preventive mean?

1. adjectiveDesigned or intended to stop something undesirable from happening.
2. nounA medicine or measure used to stop something, especially disease, from occurring.

Preventive in a sentence

• adjective

  Regular dental check-ups are a simple preventive measure.

• noun

  The vaccine works as a preventive against seasonal flu.

• adjective

  The clinic focuses on preventive care rather than treating illness after it starts.

• noun

  The doctor recommended a daily preventive for travellers heading to malaria zones.

Where does preventive come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb praevenire, which meant literally 'to come before' or 'to anticipate', formed from prae meaning 'before' and venire meaning 'to come'. From the idea of arriving ahead of something grew the sense of acting in advance to stop a problem from happening at all. English picked the word up in the seventeenth century, building 'preventive' on the established stem of 'prevent', which had entered the language a little earlier from the same Latin source. The very same venire root still turns up in a crowd of familiar relatives such as 'event', 'invent', 'convene' and 'avenue', all carrying a buried sense of coming or arriving. A longer twin form, 'preventative', appeared later and means the same thing; the shorter 'preventive' is the older and tidier spelling, and remembering the plain stem 'prevent' is the surest way to avoid slipping an extra 'at' into the middle.

How the word is built

• pre- (before)
• vent (root of Latin venire, to come)
• -ive (adjective/noun suffix)