emotive or emotional? The main meaning of emotive is ‘arousing strong feelings, appealing to the feelings (rather than reason)’, whereas the core sense of emotional: an emotive use of language chooses words specifically for their power to produce an emotional response. Emotional is the commoner word with a broader range of use; its core sense is ‘feeling or expressing emotion’. By making an emotional speech a speaker would show how strongly he or she felt about something. But somebody making an emotive speech would be He made an emotional speech would mean that the speaker showed in his speech how strongly he himself felt about something. She made an emotive speech would suggest that she was more interested in stirring up the crowd than expressing her own feeling