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executive

adjectivenouncommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ɪɡˈzɛkjʊtɪv//
  • United Kingdom//ɛɡˈzɛkjʊtɪv//
  • United States//ɪɡˈzɛkjətɪv//

Designed or fitted for execution, or carrying into effect.

adjective

  1. 1

    Designed or fitted for execution, or carrying into effect.

  2. 2

    Of, pertaining to, or having responsibility for the day-to-day running of an organisation, business, country, etc.

    executive act

    an executive officer

    executive government

    When vacancies happen in the Representation from any State, the Executive Authority thereof shall issue Writs of Election to fill such Vacancies.

  3. 3

    Exclusive.

    She works in an office with an executive bathroom.

Etymology

From Middle French executif, from Latin executivus, from Latin exsequi, from ex- ‘out’ + sequi ‘follow’.

noun

  1. 1

    A chief officer or administrator, especially one who can make significant decisions on their own authority.

    Such, Mr. Cleveland, is the real character of the government, of which you are the nominal head. Such are, and have been, its lawmakers. Such are, and have been, its judges. Such have been its executives. Such is its present executive. Have you anything to say for any of them?

    But as we approach the question of presidential power, we half overcome mental hazards by recognizing them. The opinions of judges, no less than executives and publicists, often suffer the infirmity of confusing the issue of a power's validity with the cause it is invoked to promote, of confounding the permanent executive office with its temporary occupant.

  2. 2

    The branch of government that is responsible for enforcing laws and judicial decisions, and for the day-to-day administration of the state.

  3. 3

    A committee that manages the day-to-day running of an organisation. An executive committee.

    She was on the executive of the Union of Democratic Mineworkers.

  4. 4

    A process that coordinates and governs the action of other processes or threads; supervisor.

    1973, ACM Special Interest Group in Operating Systems, Fourth Symposium on Operating System Principles The second phase of the executive development proceeded through two steps as stated in Section 2. First, a failsoft executive was developed providing automatic failure detection and recovery […]

Forms

plural
executives
comparative
more executive
superlative
most executive
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).