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expressive

UK/ɪkˈspɹɛsɪv/US/ɪkˈspɹɛsɪv/
adjectiveB2Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #10,879 of 15,258leans written

Expressive means showing feeling clearly. A face you can read across a room.

Faces, eyes, hands and music are the usual subjects, and an expressive performance is one that carries emotion rather than just notes. Applied to a person it is a compliment about openness. Language teaching uses the word technically, since expressive language is what a learner can produce as opposed to what they understand. Its opposite, inexpressive, describes a face that gives nothing away, and deadpan is the deliberate version of that.

Definitions of expressive

  1. 1adjectiveexpressiveClearly showing thoughts or feelings.B2

    “She has enormously expressive hands.”

Where it comes from

  1. Middle French

    expressif

  2. English, today

    expressive

From Middle French expressif.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Man Called Ove, Word Building

First appears in chapter 3 of A Man Called Ove.

Practise this word

expressive in the wild

  • A person with expressive aphasia will exhibit effortful speech.

    Expressive aphasia

  • Mixed receptive-expressive language disorder is a communication disorder in which both the receptive and expressive areas of communication may be affected in any degree, from mild to severe.

    Mixed receptive-expressive language disorder

  • Mixed receptive-expressive language disorder is also known as receptive-expressive language impairment (RELI) or receptive language disorder.

    Mixed receptive-expressive language disorder

  • The expressive therapies are based on the assumption that people can heal through the various forms of creative expression.

    Expressive therapies

  • Rubato is an expressive shaping of music that is a part of phrasing.

    Tempo rubato

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

From Project Gutenberg, public domain. These sentences are from real books, shown to illustrate the word at work.