Skip to content
OneKitly

creative

adjectivenouncommon in dialogue

  • //kɹiˈeɪtɪv//
  • //kəˈɹeɪtɪv//

Tending to create things, or having the ability to create; often, excellently, in a novel fashion, or any or all of these.

adjective

  1. 1

    Tending to create things, or having the ability to create; often, excellently, in a novel fashion, or any or all of these.

    a creative dramatist who avoids cliche

    The future belongs to those aware enough to see the system, brave enough to reject it, and creative enough to build something better.

  2. 2

    Original, expressive and imaginative.

    a creative new solution to an old problem

  3. 3

    A type of set of natural numbers, related to mathematical logic.

    a creative set

  4. 4

    Designed or executed to deceive or mislead.

    creative accounting and bookkeeping

  5. 5

    bad, unartistic, busy.

Etymology

Borrowed from Late Latin creativus, from Latin creō. Equivalent to create + -ive. Displaced native Old English orþanclīċ.

noun

  1. 1

    A person directly involved in a creative process; a creator of creative content.

    He is a visionary creative.

    In a speech in Sydney, he promised Australia's laws "will spell … out" clear protections for creatives who permit AI to train on their books, music and art, and also implied further work to come on the copyright issue.

  2. 2

    Artistic material used in advertising, e.g. photographs, drawings, or video.

    The design team has completed the creative for next month's multi-part ad campaign.

    I've included in my portfolio all the creative I've completed in my five year design career.

Forms

plural
creatives
comparative
more creative
superlative
most creative
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).