expressive
/ɪkˈsprɛsɪv
/ /ɛkˈsprɛsɪv/adjective
1Effectively conveying thought or feeling: she has big expressive eyes...
- Bertie gave an expressive grunt, which conveyed his opinion that there was no accounting for tastes.
- Sometimes the effects are so expressive you can't believe chance did this.
- As passionate and expressive as she is in her acting roles, as an interviewee she can be extremely difficult.
Synonyms
eloquent, meaningful, telling, revealing, demonstrative, suggestive
emotional, full of emotion/feeling, indicating emotion/feeling, passionate, intense, deeply felt, poignant, moving, stirring, striking, evocative, artistic;
vivid, graphic, descriptive, ardent, powerful, charged, imaginative, inspired, visionary
1.1 (expressive of) Conveying (a specified quality or idea): the spires are expressive of religious aspiration...
- His ideas are no more expressive of sophistic thought than of some very ancient Greek traditions.
- That idea of communality is not expressive of contemporary experience.
- Note her definition of art as ‘the practice of creating perceptible forms expressive of human feeling.’
Synonyms
indicative, demonstrative, demonstrating, showing, suggesting, revealing, underlining
Derivatives
expressively
/ /ɛkˈsprɛsɪvli / adverb ...- The two women were engaged in animated conversation, the younger one gesturing expressively with well-tended hands and long-manicured fingers.
- It made it possible for him to reinvent the face before him, depicting expressively, through curves and angles, the way the subject felt to him.
- String players slid expressively from one note to the next - portamento, the style was called - in imitation of the slide of the voice.
expressiveness
- Her beautiful looks and elegant acting were matched by rich tone, expressiveness, and virtuoso technique, which can be heard in her recordings.
- We need to approach multimedia presentations with a sense of artistic expressiveness.
- One of her ambitions as a young artist was to create on canvas the sweeping expressiveness of music, its ability to shift agilely from joyous to sorrowful to triumphant.
expressivity
/ /ɛksprɛˈsɪvɪti / noun ...- For me, the balance between power and expressivity seems just right.
- Young girls typically play with one or two other girls in activities that foster their ‘learning emotional skills of empathy, emotional self-awareness, and emotional expressivity.’
- The differences might arise from variations in expressivity of these morphological traits in the populations.
Origin
Late Middle English (in the sense 'tending to press out'): from French expressif, -ive or medieval Latin expressivus, from exprimere 'press out' (see express3). Compare with express1.