Being respectful means treating someone as though they matter. Standing up when the older neighbour comes in, listening without cutting in, taking your shoes off because that is the rule in this house.
Respectful goes with OF and TOWARDS: respectful of other people's time, respectful towards his teachers. It also describes things rather than people, as in a respectful silence, a respectful distance, a respectful nod, where it means holding properly back instead of pushing in. The opposite is disrespectful and the adverb is respectfully, which is how formal letters used to sign off. Three lookalikes trip everybody up: respectable means good enough to be respected (a respectable job, a respectable score), respective means belonging to each one separately (they went back to their respective rooms), and respectful is the one about how you behave towards people.
1adjectiverespectfulShowing proper regard for someone and treating them politely.
“He was respectful to everyone in the building, from the director down.”
synonyms: polite, courteous, deferential
2adjectivesilenceOf a silence, a distance or a manner: marked by proper restraint.
“The photographers kept a respectful distance from the family.”
Respectful is built in the open, from respect plus -ful, the ending that means full of, the same one in careful, hopeful and painful. It keeps only one l at the end, even though full has two, and that holds for every word made this way. A respectful person is exactly what the two parts say: full of respect.
Latin
respectus
Old French
respect
Middle English
respect
English
respect
English, today
respectful
Built from
From respect + ful. respect comes from Middle English respect, from Old French respect, from Latin respectus. From respect. From Middle English respect, from Old French respect, also respit (“respect, regard, consideration”), from Latin respectus (“a looking at, regard, respect”), perfect passive participle of respiciō (“look at, look back upon, respect”), from re- (“back”) + speciō (“to see”), equivalent to re + spect. a doublet of respite.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA