Subjective

How to spell subjective

10 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce subjective

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does subjective mean?

1. adjectiveBased on personal feelings, tastes, or opinions rather than on objective fact.

Subjective in a sentence

• The judges admitted that scoring the dessert was largely subjective.

• Beauty is a subjective quality that varies from person to person.

Where does subjective come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word descends from the Latin subiectivus, formed from subiectus, the past participle of subicere, which literally meant 'to throw or place under', built from sub 'under' and iacere 'to throw'. In medieval and later philosophical Latin the term came to describe what belongs to the thinking subject, that is, the mind that perceives, rather than to the external object being perceived. English adopted it in the late fourteenth century, at first in technical grammatical and logical senses, and by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it had settled into its familiar meaning of personal, based on individual feeling rather than fact. The same ject root, that idea of throwing, runs through a whole family of relatives such as 'reject', 'project', 'inject', and 'eject', which is a handy reminder that the middle of subjective is spelled with that visible 'ject'. The trickiest part for writers is simply the unstressed ending, since the word sounds like it could end in 'tive' but is in fact built on 'ject' plus '-ive'.

How the word is built

• sub- (under)
• ject (from jacere: to throw)
• -ive (adjective suffix)