Repressive

How to spell repressive

10 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce repressive

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does repressive mean?

1. adjectiveRestricting personal freedom by harsh control or the use of force.

Repressive in a sentence

• The new government quickly passed a series of repressive laws.

• Journalists fled the country to escape its repressive regime.

Where does repressive come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb premere, meaning 'to press' or 'to push down', whose past participle stem gave us pressus. Adding the prefix re-, meaning 'back', produced reprimere and its past participle repressus, literally 'pressed back' or 'held down by force'. From this came the medieval Latin and Old French notion of checking or restraining something, and English adopted 'repress' in the late 1300s for holding back emotions or movements. The adjective 'repressive' was formed later, in the early 1600s, by attaching the suffix -ive, which signals a tendency or quality, so the word came to describe systems or rules that hold people down. The same premere root still presses quietly inside familiar relatives such as 'pressure', 'depress', and 'compress', and remembering that single central 'press' helps fix the double s in the spelling.

How the word is built

• re- (back)
• press (to press, from Latin premere)
• -ive (tending to)