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directive

adjectivenounattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//daɪˈɹɛk.tɪv//
  • United Kingdom//dɪˈɹɛk.tɪv//
  • Canada//dəˈɹɛk.tɪv//
  • Canada//dɪˈɹɛk.tɪv//
  • Canada//daɪˈɹɛk.tɪv//

That which directs; serving to direct, indicate, or guide.

adjective

  1. 1

    That which directs; serving to direct, indicate, or guide.

    A directive management style is stronger among owners with 'lifestyle' as a business objective than among those with business/economic objectives.

  2. 2

    Relating to the directive case.

Etymology

From Middle French directif. The noun senses are from French directive (feminine form of the adjective).

noun

  1. 1

    An instruction or guideline that indicates how to perform an action or reach a goal.

  2. 2

    A construct in source code that indicates how it should be processed but is not necessarily part of the program to be run.

  3. 3

    An authoritative decision from an official body, which may or may not have binding force.

  4. 4

    A form of legislative act addressed to the member states. The directive binds the member state to reach certain objectives in their national legislation.

  5. 5

    The directive case.

Forms

plural
directives
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).