emotive

 
Pronunciation: /ɪˈməʊtɪv/

adjective

  • arousing or able to arouse intense feeling: animal experimentation is an emotive subject the issue has proved highly emotive
  • expressing a person’s feelings rather than being neutrally descriptive: the comparisons are emotive rather than analytic

Derivatives

emotively

adverb

emotiveness

noun

emotivity

Pronunciation: /ˌiːməʊˈtɪvɪti/
noun

Origin:

mid 18th century: from Latin emot- 'moved', from the verb emovere (see emotion)

The words emotive and emotional share similarities but are not simply interchangeable. Emotive is used to mean ‘arousing intense feeling’, while emotional tends to mean ‘characterized by intense feeling’. Thus an emotive issue is one which is likely to arouse people’s passions, while an emotional response is one which is itself full of passion. In sentences such as we took our emotive farewells the word emotive has been used in a context where emotional would be more appropriate.