purgative
adjective, noun
purgative is an adjective meaning “purging” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled P-U-R-G-A-T-I-V-E, and it appears about once in every 15 million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data).
What does purgative mean?
adjective
- 1
purging
noun
- 1
something, such as a substance or medicine, that purges; laxative
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
How do you pronounce purgative?
- US
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: LL-Q1860_(eng)-Wodencafe-purgative.wav, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).
Forms of purgative
- purgatives plural
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
How common is purgative?
Purgative appears about once in every 15 million words in written English, the 115,751st most frequent word form in the list.
Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).
Purgative in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Translations are Wiktionary's, by sense; a linked word has its own PlainSpell page.
Where does purgative come from?
From Middle French purgatif.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).