Attentive is watching and listening properly, and then acting on what you notice. The waiter who refills your glass before you ask. The friend who remembers you hate crowds and books the quiet table by the window.
It takes TO: attentive to detail, attentive to her needs, attentive to what the patient actually said. There are two flavours. One is concentration — an attentive audience, quiet and leaning forward, nobody looking at a phone. The other is care: an attentive husband, an attentive nurse, where the point is not only noticing but doing something about it. The noun is attention, the adverb attentively, and the opposite English reaches for is inattentive rather than unattentive.
1adjectivealertListening or watching closely.
“The class was unusually attentive that morning.”
2adjectiveattentiveNoticing what someone needs and looking after them.
“He was attentive to his mother all through her illness.”
synonyms: caring, considerate, solicitous
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
Attentive arrived in Middle English as attentif, borrowed straight from Old French attentif. It is one of the quiet crossings: the spelling settled into an English shape, the meaning stayed exactly where it was, and six hundred years later it still means what it meant then.
Old French
attentif
Middle English
attentif
English, today
attentive
From Middle English attentif, attentijf, from Old French attentif.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA