Reactive

How to spell reactive

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce reactive

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does reactive mean?

1. adjectiveResponding to events or stimuli as they happen rather than acting in advance, or readily undergoing a chemical or physical reaction.

Reactive in a sentence

• The manager admitted that the team was too reactive and rarely planned ahead.

• Sodium is a highly reactive metal that bursts into flame when it touches water.

Where does reactive come from?

Language of origin: Latin

Reactive is built from the Latin verb agere, meaning 'to do, to drive, or to set in motion', whose past participle actus gave English the root 'act'. The prefix re- adds the sense of 'back' or 'in response', so the underlying idea is acting back against something that has already happened. The word was assembled in English by the early nineteenth century, largely in scientific writing, to describe substances or systems that respond readily to a stimulus, especially in chemistry where a reactive element combines easily with others. From there it spread into psychology and everyday business language, where being 'reactive' means responding to events after they occur rather than planning ahead. The same agere root sits inside a large family of relatives such as action, agent, and react, and remembering that 'act' is the core helps lock in the spelling, since the word is simply re + act + ive with no hidden letters.

How the word is built

• re- (back, again)
• act (from Latin actus: a doing, driving)
• -ive (adjective: tending to)