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Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
imaginative
adjective
COLLOCATIONS FROM CORPUS
■ ADVERB
highly
▪ The project was highly imaginative, building on a commercial ranching project which already existed.
▪ Rather, the guitar and drum set seem like obbligato instruments, threading their way through the varied and highly imaginative texture.
▪ On the right is the highly imaginative Challenger rod bag.
more
▪ He also urges computer users to think up more imaginative passwords.
▪ The wife of the farmer: Poor, hardworking, and a little more imaginative than her husband.
▪ It wasn't that he wanted to be more imaginative than them.
▪ But with those credentials, Safire could surely have been more imaginative.
▪ It means more imaginative deployment of staff.
▪ According to the committee, the government should be more imaginative in supporting research.
▪ Later more imaginative tactics were adopted to try to achieve maximum disruption for a small loss of earnings.
▪ There are more imaginative regulatory ideas that harness the price mechanism and market forces.
most
▪ Some of the most imaginative and interesting places to work and visit are converted historic buildings.
▪ So are her romantic schoolgirls, and Betsy in this book is the most imaginative of all the race.
▪ Scales was the most imaginative of his inspectors; he had started in fingerprints and now specialised in fraud cases.
▪ This idealized version is most imaginative as a teenager when any fantasy is possible.
▪ Her books deal in changing perceptions rather than unalterable truths, and she herself was perhaps her most imaginative achievement ....
▪ One of the most imaginative that I have seen uses a series of bowls and a conventional fountain spray.
▪ A mismatch between the most imaginative practice and the best teacher education can never be good for the latter.
very
▪ It's very imaginative and beautifully shot.
▪ Mr. Moynihan My hon. Friend makes a very imaginative proposal.
▪ Not very imaginative, it amounted to a genuflection to Papini and his authoritative views.
▪ Female speaker He's very imaginative with lots of ideas.
▪ Sabraxis was a stern mistress, but she was very imaginative and continually updated the traditional pieces.
▪ George is a quiet, fairly shy person, who is not very imaginative and needs some one to share a life with.
■ NOUN
approach
▪ But the avant-garde has found support for its imaginative approach from such sciences as biology.
▪ This can be successful especially where an imaginative approach to development is adopted.
▪ If he needs a more imaginative approach to biblical meditation, show him the Ignatian method.
idea
▪ But ultimately, good ads are imaginative ideas.
▪ They offered the chance for specifiers to turn their imaginative ideas into reality.
▪ Thus, it is not just imaginative ideas which are required but an increase in investment of management time.
leap
▪ Doing history does require an imaginative leap, and contact with real evidence from the past can often assist in this process.
▪ You have nothing to lose by trying out possible futures for size-it just requires an imaginative leap.
▪ Very often it helps pupils to make the imaginative leap that is required of a historian.
play
▪ The family Dolls Families of dolls or puppets provide children with the opportunity for much free imaginative play.
▪ In his imaginative play, the child inpart creates a world of his own and the creatures or objects in it.
▪ Climbing frames should be shaped to encourage imaginative play - airplanes, wagons or spaceships are popular.
solution
▪ Indeed it would, but there may be more imaginative solutions to be commended.
▪ A more imaginative solution is shown in figure 4.19.
use
▪ For example, the imaginative use of stop changes can greatly enrich the singing of the Psalms.
ways
▪ The private sector probably has even more flexibility to find imaginative ways of addressing those issues than the statutory services.
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
imaginative storytelling
▪ an imaginative Halloween costume
▪ an imaginative novelist
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ Nearly every piece here is deft, intelligent and imaginative.
▪ Surprisingly, to imaginative educators, both the verbal and the mechanical boys have less trouble in all-male institutions.
▪ The titles are the most understated thing about these imaginative creations.
▪ They say imaginative management and co-operation with tenants will make for a model estate.
▪ This Government's many imaginative and effective initiatives are far more helpful to the regions than any hare-brained scheme from Labour.
▪ Using local produce, the food is imaginative, wholesome and substantial.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Imaginative

Imaginative \Im*ag"i*na*tive\, a. [F. imaginatif.]

  1. Proceeding from, and characterized by, the imagination, generally in the highest sense of the word.

    In all the higher departments of imaginative art, nature still constitutes an important element.
    --Mure.

  2. Given to imagining; full of images, fancies, etc.; having a quick imagination; conceptive; creative.

    Milton had a highly imaginative, Cowley a very fanciful mind.
    --Coleridge.

  3. Unreasonably suspicious; jealous. [Obs.]
    --Chaucer. -- Im*ag"i*na*tive*ly, adv. -- Im*ag"i*na*tive*ness, n.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
imaginative

late 14c., ymaginatyf, from Old French imaginatif and directly from Medieval Latin imaginativus, from imaginat-, stem of Latin imaginari (see imagine). Related: Imaginatively; imaginativeness.

Wiktionary
imaginative

a. 1 having a lively or creative imagination 2 tending to be fanciful or inventive 3 false or imagined

WordNet
imaginative

adj. (used of persons or artifacts) marked by independence and creativity in thought or action; "an imaginative use of material"; "the invention of the knitting frame by another ingenious English clergyman"- Lewis Mumford; "an ingenious device"; "had an inventive turn of mind"; "inventive ceramics" [syn: ingenious, inventive]

Usage examples of "imaginative".

It is easy to see that the method, while it gives unusual freshness to imaginative representation, is in essence hostile to all culture and all social form, and is psychologically akin to anarchism.

Poor old soul - to what pitiful depths of hallucination had his liquor, plus his hatred of the decay, alienage, and disease around him, brought that fertile, imaginative brain?

Poor old soul--to what pitiful depths of hallucination had his liquor, plus his hatred of the decay, alienage, and disease around him, brought that fertile, imaginative brain?

In Apaecides the whole aspect betokened the fervor and passion of his temperament, and the intellectual portion of his nature seemed, by the wild fire of the eyes, the great breadth of the temples when compared with the height of the brow, the trembling restlessness of the lips, to be swayed and tyrannized over by the imaginative and ideal.

And yet, at the same time, all these imaginative emblems were, unquestionably, intended to foreshadow, in various kinds and degrees, doctrinal conceptions, hopes, fears, threats, promises, historical realities, past, present, or future.

But the scientific attitude tends, except in the highest minds, to develop a certain dryness, a scepticism about spiritual and imaginative forces, a dulness of the inner apprehension, a hard quality of judgment.

Whatever poetical or imaginative suggestions might lie in this scene for others, it made no such appeal to Tom Emmet as he strode along, passing belated pedestrians in his course.

The battle of sensualism, the scramble over material interests, the wearing absorption in the small and evanescent struggles of social rivalry, the irritated attention given to the ever thickening claims of external things, the pulverizing discussions of all sorts of opinions by hostile schools, are fatal to that concentrated calmness of mood, that unity of passion, that serene amplitude of intellectual and imaginative scope, that docile religious receptiveness of soul, requisite for the fit contemplation of a doctrine so solemn and sublime as that of immortality.

The boundary notion of East and West, the varying degrees of projected inferiority and strength, the range of work done, the kinds of characteristic features ascribed to the Orient: all these testify to a willed imaginative and geographic division made between East and West, and lived through during many centuries.

Brain Stoker, Matthew Griffon and a few other highly imaginative writers.

By his brooding on the perpetual failure, not only of others, but of himself, to live up to his imaginative ideals, his consequent cynical scorn for humanity, the jejune credulity as to the absolute validity of his ideals and the unworthiness of the world in disregarding them, his wincings and mockeries under the sting of the petty disillusions which every hour spent among men brings to his infallibly quick observation, he has acquired the half tragic, half ironic air, the mysterious moodiness, the suggestion of a strange and terrible history that has left him nothing but undying remorse, by which Childe Harold fascinated the grandmothers of his English contemporaries.

Some of the enthusiasts seeking to meet me were seeking to meet what they properly considered a Far Journeyer, but a great many wished to meet a man they mistakenly considered Un Grand Romancier, author of an imaginative and entertaining fiction, and others clearly wished only to ogle a Prodigious Liar, as they might have flocked to watch the frusta of some eminent criminal at the piazzetta pillars.

One can imagine the greater the adversity the greater the sudden realization of a stream of imaginative work, and the greater the sudden katharsis of poetry, from the isolated interpretation of war as calamity to the realization of the imaginative and actual tragedy of Man.

He was brave, imaginative, quick-the ideal target for a kidsman, one of those who took in unwanted children and made thieves of them.

The overall impression is fairly homogeneous: serious, durable, liveable, but imaginative.