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exclusive

adjectivenouncommon in dialogue

  • United States//ɪkˈsklu.sɪv//
  • United States//ɪkˈsklu.zɪv//

Excluding items or members that do not meet certain conditions.

adjective

  1. 1

    Excluding items or members that do not meet certain conditions.

  2. 2

    figurativeReferring to a membership organisation, service or product: of high quality and/or renown, for superior members only.

  3. 3

    A snobbish usage, suggesting that members who do not meet requirements, which may be financial, of social status, religion, skin colour etc., are excluded.

    Exclusive clubs tend to serve exclusive brands of food and drinks, in the same exorbitant price range, such as the 'finest' French châteaux.

  4. 4

    Exclusionary.

  5. 5

    Whole, undivided, entire.

    The teacher's pet commands the teacher's exclusive attention.

  6. 6

    Of or relating to the first-person plural pronoun when excluding the person being addressed.

    The pronoun in "We're going to a party later, but you aren't invited" is an exclusive "we".

  7. 7

    Having a romantic or sexual relationship with one another, to the exclusion of others.

    They decided to no longer be exclusive.

Etymology

From Latin exclūsīvus, from excludere (“to shut out, exclude”), from ex- (“out”) + variant form of verb claudere (“to close, shut”).

noun

  1. 1

    Information (or an artefact) that is granted or obtained exclusively.

    The editor agreed to keep a lid on a potentially disastrous political scoop in exchange for an exclusive of a happier nature.

  2. 2

    A member of a group who excludes others from their society.

    The exclusives at the English Universities apply the term CAD to all non-members.

  3. 3

    A word or phrase that restricts something, such as only, solely, or simply.

Forms

plural
exclusives
comparative
more exclusive
superlative
most exclusive
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).