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progressive

adjectivenounnounnounattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//pɹəˈɡɹɛsɪv//
  • Canada//pɹəˈɡɹɛsɪv//
  • Canada//pɹoʊ-//
  • Australia//pɹəˈɡɹesɪv//
  • New Zealand//pɹəˈɡɹesəv//

Favouring or promoting progress; advanced.

adjective

  1. 1

    Favouring or promoting progress; advanced.

  2. 2

    Gradually advancing in extent; increasing.

  3. 3

    Promoting or favoring progress towards improved conditions or new policies, ideas, or methods.

    a progressive politician

    progressive business leadership

  4. 4

    Liberal.

    Conservative movements were far more progressive than the standard religious narrative of the decade alleges and the notoriously progressive ethos of the era was far more conservative than our collective memory has recognized.

    Michigan Sen. Elissa Slotkin on Wednesday called for “action, not words” from Democrats, criticizing the approach of some in the progressive wing of the party.

  5. 5

    Of or relating to progressive education.

    a progressive school

  6. 6

    Increasing in rate as the taxable amount increases.

  7. 7

    Advancing in severity.

    progressive paralysis

  8. 8

    Continuous.

Etymology

From the Middle French progressif, from the Latin prōgressīvus, from prōgredior (perfect participial stem: prōgress-) + -īvus. Displaced native Old English forþgenġe. By surface analysis, progress + -ive.

noun

  1. 1

    One with liberal or progressive political beliefs.

    The progressives want to legalise gay marriage.

    Not long ago, few progressives imagined this day would come. They assumed the MAGA movement had been discredited by the shocking images that emerged from the January 6 insurrection, and that Trump was politically weakened by the barrage of criminal charges against him.

noun

  1. 1

    A person who actively favors or strives for progress towards improved conditions, as in society or government.

  2. 2

    A progressive verb; a verb used in the progressive tense and (in English) generally conjugated to end in -ing.

noun

  1. 1

    Variant of progressive dinnerClipping of progressive dinner

Forms

plural
progressives
comparative
more progressive
superlative
most progressive
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).