1 (technical) a worker, especially one who works with their hands:
a factory operative * skilled / unskilled operatives
2 (especially AmE) a person who does secret work, especially for a government organization:
an intelligence operative
Part of speech: adjective
1 [notusuallybeforenoun] ready to be used; in use:
This law becomes operative immediately. * The station will be fully operative again in January.
2 [onlybeforenoun] (medical) connected with a medical operation:
operative mortality / treatment
seealsoPOST-OPERATIVE
IDIOMS
the operative word used to emphasize that a particular word or phrase is the most important one in a sentence:
I was in love with her-'was' being the operative word.
Rate this entry
About this entry
This is a English–English dictionary entry.
Sourced from Main Dictionary in Lughet's collection.
This word also appears under other sources in Lughet's collection — see the list below.
Where does this definition of operative come from?
This entry for operative is sourced from Main Dictionary, one of the dictionaries and corpora merged into Lughet.
Is operative a noun, verb, or something else?
In this entry, operative is tagged as noun.
Does operative appear elsewhere on Lughet?
Yes — operative appears under other sources or language pairs in Lughet's collection. See the list below.
What is Lughet?
Lughet is a free trilingual dictionary covering nearly five million entries across Uyghur, Chinese, and English, drawn from more than ten source dictionaries and corpora.
