Other forms: creatives
Creative means full of new ideas and good at making new things. A creative person, creative writing, creative solutions.
It also describes the work itself — the creative industries, a creative role. As a noun in advertising and design, a creative is a person doing that work: the creatives are in the other room. There is a sharper use: creative accounting means dishonest bookkeeping, and creative with the truth means lying. Note creativity, the noun, and that creative is now applied to almost any job to make it sound more interesting.
1adjectivecreativeFull of new ideas; good at making new things.
“She is creative in a way that makes meetings difficult.”
synonyms: imaginative, inventive
2nounworkSomebody who does creative work in advertising or design.
“The creatives had the idea and the lawyers killed it.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
creative is a quality of inventiveness.
Latin creare means to make or bring forth. The adjective creative is surprisingly recent in English — it dates from the seventeenth century, and its use as a compliment for ordinary people is largely a twentieth-century development.
Latin
creativus
English, today
creative
Latin creativus, from Latin creō. Equivalent to create + -ive. Displaced native orþanclīċ.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA