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restive

UK/ˈɹɛstɪv/US/ˈɹɛstɪv/
adjectiveC2Very rare — outside the 30,000 commonest English words, so you will meet it in writing rather than in speechleans written

Restive means restless and hard to keep under control. A restive audience.

It began as the opposite, describing a horse that refused to move at all. Restive now means fidgeting rather than refusing, which is close to a reversal of meaning.

Definitions of restive

  1. 1adjectiverestiveRestless and hard to keep under control.C2

    “The party grew restive after an hour of speeches.”

restive is a quality.

Where it comes from

Old French restif, from rester, to stay, since the word first described a horse that would not go on.

  1. Latin

    restō

  2. Old French

    restif

  3. Middle English

    restyf

  4. English, today

    restive

Built from

  • rester · Old French — to stay, remain

Modification of earlier restiff, from Middle English restyf, from Old French restif, from rester (“to stay, remain”), from Latin restō.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

restive in the wild

  • Together they would control Eastern Europe, making sure that restive ethnic groups such as the Poles were kept in control.

    League of the Three Emperors

  • During his service under the Shu emperor Liu Shan, Huo Yi suppressed tribal rebellions in the restive Nanzhong region and maintained peace in the area.

    Huo Yi

  • Younger artists grew increasingly restive under its constraint, and in 1825 left to found the National Academy of Design.

    American Academy of the Fine Arts

  • Militarily, Barjawan was successful in restoring order to the Fatimids' restive Levantine and Libyan provinces, and set the stage for an enduring truce with the Byzantine Empire.

    Barjawan

  • Following years of brutal suppression, civil war, and excessive taxation, the rural population of central China was restive, and susceptible to militant salvationist movements.

    Spirit Soldier rebellions (1920–1926)

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.

Related words

the restō family

arrest

restive — used too rare to measure · point at the bar for the others