Representative

How to spell representative

14 letters · 5 syllables

How to pronounce representative

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does representative mean?

1. nounA person chosen or appointed to act or speak on behalf of others.
2. adjectiveTypical of a particular group or serving as an example of it.

Representative in a sentence

• noun

  The sales representative visited three clients before lunch.

• adjective

  The survey used a representative sample of the population.

• noun

  Each district elects one representative to the council.

• adjective

  These figures are not representative of a normal trading month.

Where does representative come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb repraesentare, which meant 'to make present', 'to bring before the eye', or 'to display', formed from the prefix re- and praesentare 'to present or show'. In medieval Latin the idea broadened so that one thing could stand in the place of another, literally making something absent present again. English took the word in through Old French in the late 1300s, at first describing something that pictured or symbolised another thing, and only later settling on the modern sense of a person who acts in the place of others. The political meaning, a person chosen to speak for a group of voters, grew firmly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The same praesentare root sits inside the everyday words 'present' and 'presentation', and noticing the buried word 'present' in the middle helps fix the tricky run of unstressed vowels in the spelling.

How the word is built

• re- (again, intensive)
• present (from Latin praesentare: to make present, show)
• -ative (adjective/noun suffix)