meliorativeadj.n.

1808 G. Edwards Plain Pract. Plan iii. 30 We..become savage in our hatred to the various meliorative processes.

1841 R. Oastler Fleet Papers I. xl. 314 Peel has no meliorative and restorative principle to propose.

1899 T. Veblen Theory of Leisure Class xi. 288 The ostensibly post-Darwinian concept of a meliorative trend in the process of evolution.

1902 Encycl. Brit. XXXI. 678/1 The so-called meliorative and pejorative developments in word-meaning.

1916 F. Swinnerton Chaste Wife xvii. §2. 254 Its note had been meliorative rather than optimistic.

1954 M. A. Pei & F. Gaynor Dict. Linguistics 134 Meliorative suffix, a suffix which gives a word a more favorable or flattering connotation.

1967 R. A. Waldron Sense & Sense Devel. vii. 159 Shrewd is certainly most often a term of praise nowadays, though it comes from ME shrewede ‘wicked, vicious’..and passes through the ‘cunning, crafty’ stage before reaching its present mainly meliorative sense.

1973 Times Lit. Suppl. 8 June 647/3 His qualities were British, in the meliorative sense.

1997 Times 3 July ii. 43/4 London now became its most famous, crowd-pulling spokesman, supporting not only meliorative reform but violent revolution.

1933 G. A. Van Dongen Amelioratives in Eng. I. 115 The delimitation of the scope of content displayed by those words..may result in the word becoming a meliorative or a pejorative.

1989 Bks. in Canada Dec. 8/2 The word ethnic itself is now considered derogatory in Ottawa, where officials have taken to using two new melioratives: people of European ancestry other than British, French, or Irish are called multicults, and all others are visi-mins.