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sedative

nounadjectiveattested in dialogue

  • //ˈsɛdətɪv//

An agent or drug that sedates, having a calming or soothing effect, or inducing sleep.

noun

  1. 1

    An agent or drug that sedates, having a calming or soothing effect, or inducing sleep.

Etymology

Inherited from Middle English sedatif, from Anglo-Norman sedatif, from Medieval Latin sēdātīvus, which itself likely influenced the modern spelling. By surface analysis, sedate + -ive.

adjective

  1. 1

    Calming, soothing, inducing sleep, tranquilizing

Forms

plural
sedatives
comparative
more sedative
superlative
most sedative
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).