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attentive

adjectiveattested in dialogue

  • United States//əˈtɛntɪv//
  • United States/[əˈtʰɛntʰɪv]/
  • United States//əˈtɪntɪv//
  • United States/[əˈtʰɪ̟ntʰɪv]/
  • Australia//əˈtentɪv//

Paying attention; noticing, watching, listening, or attending closely.

adjective

  1. 1

    Paying attention; noticing, watching, listening, or attending closely.

    She is an attentive listener, but does not like to talk much.

    King-of-the-Sky was sitting alone in the Leeward Village meeting-house, gesticulating to the attentive shades of night, roaring out the genealogy of his ancestors, telling the sleeping world of his greatness.

  2. 2

    Courteous; mindful.

    a husband attentive to his wife’s needs

Etymology

From Middle English attentif, attentijf, from Old French attentif.

Forms

comparative
more attentive
superlative
most attentive
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).