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What is "acquisitive"

Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
acquisitive
adjective
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ Are we at risk from acquisitive predators, and who are they?
▪ But standing there with Billie, surrounded by implements that promised home improvement, he yielded to an acquisitive urge.
▪ Cut off from the mass of the people by race and language, the rulers also became increasingly acquisitive in terms of land.
▪ For government was occasioned by the needs of capitalism and the acquisitive mentality which capitalism produced.
▪ He had never previously thought of himself as acquisitive or even as particularly materialistic.
▪ Now, he said, most acquisitive companies would still prefer to do friendly transactions.
▪ Old, or unearned, money tends to be neither acquisitive nor outward-going, whereas new money tends to be both.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Acquisitive

Acquisitive \Ac*quis"i*tive\, a.

  1. Acquired. [Obs.]

    He died not in his acquisitive, but in his native soil.
    --Wotton.

  2. Able or disposed to make acquisitions; acquiring; as, an acquisitive person or disposition.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
acquisitive

1630s, "owned through acquisition," from Latin acquisit-, past participle stem of acquirere (see acquisition) + -ive. Meaning "given to acquisition, avaricious" is from 1826 (implied in acquisitiveness). Related: Acquisitively (1590s).

Wiktionary
acquisitive

a. 1 (context obsolete English) acquire. 2 Able or disposed to make acquisitions; acquiring. 3 disposition toward acquiring and retaining information.

WordNet
acquisitive

adj. eager to acquire and possess things especially material possessions or ideas; "an acquisitive mind"; "an aquisitive society in which the craving for material things seems never satisfied" [ant: unacquisitive]

Usage examples of "acquisitive".

Save for a few surface evils he sees nothing wrong in an acquisitive society, with its equation of money and virtue, its pious millionaires and erastian clergymen.

I said, and I lifted the mask above the ruins of my mouth, and I drank, sighting along the inside lining to regard his inquisitive, acquisitive stare at the puckers into which I poured some drink.

He was a mere aggressive and acquisitive individual with no sense of the State, no habitual loyalty, no devotion, no code of honour, no code even of courage.

As you have remarked, my talents tended more to the, ahem, acquisitive and the annunciatory.

She ran it over briefly in her mind while Elathan spoke, addressing those few hundreds here in the Hall and all the watching billions: In only one day, she, Elathan and Haco Grex together had hammered out a preliminary treaty that, if all went according to plan in the coming battles, would put their three allied nations into such a position of galactic pre-eminence that not for the foreseeable future would Imperium or Phalanx or any other nascent and acquisitive superentity be able to challenge them.

With true English wit, Sir Nigel jested that one of these days he would wake up as a packrat, or some other such acquisitive vermin.

Leopol reached for it and Iantine pivoted, putting his body between it and the lad's acquisitive hands.

In a country which for several years now had been disputed in arms between two very uncousinly cousins, it was no wonder if private enemies and equally acquisitive neighbours joined in the plundering for themselves, independently of either faction.