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Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
obsessive
I.adjective
COLLOCATIONS FROM CORPUS
■ ADVERB
almost
▪ The portrait is hyper-real, with almost obsessive attention to surface, to clothing.
▪ But we reckoned without the persistence and almost obsessive scheming of Airey Neave.
▪ This tendency was reinforced by Nkrumah's almost obsessive working habits.
▪ He remembered that his attack on the archives had been almost obsessive.
▪ But everything he said was treated with almost obsessive distrust.
so
▪ At times I become so obsessive about the dangers that I find myself making lists of what could go wrong.
■ NOUN
concern
▪ With the coming of a child-centred approach to discipline, the old obsessive concern with orderly habits and unfailing obedience was discarded.
▪ It had occurred because of an obsessive concern over the possibility that the President's bid for re-election might just possibly fail.
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ Deep anxiety can cause obsessive behaviour.
▪ I try to look after my body as best I can, but I'm not obsessive about it.
▪ She's got this obsessive fear of losing control, so she never shows her emotions.
▪ She has an obsessive need to control everything.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ Also, learning to be obsessive about detail.
▪ By the next morning, the now familiar, obsessive anxiety had returned.
▪ Its obsessive search for more water, however, was never to end.
▪ More precaution than that seemed obsessive.
▪ The care of the interior demands an obsessive habit of mind.
▪ This should annoy players who are obsessive about mapping details.
▪ Who, except the most obsessive academic, reads a book as he hears speech?
II.noun
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ Dawson's obsessives will recognise this jangly, guitar-pop the second the catchy chorus kicks in.
▪ Some Beach Boys obsessives consider Landy a cruel and manipulative opportunist who brainwashed Brian in order to share his glory.
▪ Tetris obsessives find themselves placing the objects in a room neatly together in their mind.
▪ Wasn't this yet another consumer durable we didn't need, being test-marketed on obsessives?
▪ We don't work all the time, unless we're driven obsessives.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
obsessive

obsessional \obsessional\ obsessive \obsessive\adj. Persistently and abnormally preoccupied with some unreasonable idea.

Syn: compulsive.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
obsessive

1911, from obsess + -ive. Related: Obsessively. Obsessive-compulsive is attested from 1927.

Wiktionary
obsessive

a. 1 Prone to cause obsession 2 Having one thought or pursuing one activity to the absolute or nearly absolute exclusion of all others. 3 excessive, as results from obsession. n. A person who is obsessed, who has an obsession

WordNet
obsessive

adj. characterized by or constituting an obsession; "the obsessional character of his response"; "obsessive gambling" [syn: obsessional]

Usage examples of "obsessive".

Gradus is discursively seduced in a way that makes the seeming distinction between him and Kinbote, as well as that between the baroque and the simple, the cultured and the barbarous, the homosexual and the heterosexual, and the roughly masculine and the decadently effeminized, appear to be nothing more than the product of an obsessive and pedantic imagination which insists on impressing its own absurdly reductive schema on a disorderly world that consistently eludes it.

Transitional fetishism is often characterized by an obsessive preoccupation with things feminine, particularly in seeing what one looks like when dressed as a woman.

While there was no disputing her incredible talents as a scientist, Holden found her professional intensity and single-mindedness obsessive.

We had been sixties children, coddled first, then spoiled, and finally stranded by the neap tide of narcissism, left to rot with our obsessive quests for personal fulfillment.

Her satisfaction made her feel guilty, because her private war with Rayat and Neville was becoming obsessive.

And if the grotesquely brutal manner in which it killed the prey seemed obsessive, Dorma suspected that it was not.

Pythian Ode, Aphrodite gives the wryneck to Jason as the magical means to seduce Medea, and with it he binds the princess to him through her obsessive love.

His sole interest lay in getting one Captain Alicia DeVries not merely ambulatory but fully reconditioned, and his was clearly an obsessive personality.

Its most visible sign is not so much the use of the Czech language as it is a quite singular architectonic feature: the nearly obsessive recurrence of the number seven.

Today he was particularly obsessive, wearing a futuretech cleansuit over his polyester knit gym teacher shirt and beltless slacks.

Her chief and obsessive concern was to prevent Ivan leaving his fortune and his brewery to my mother and not to herself.

In the corner, half-hidden by the washing Mrs Spandrel had hung in front of the fireplace, stood one of the waywisers he and his father had pushed round the streets of London, calculating distances to an obsessive nicety.

An obsessive and thwarted cyberneticist with a taste for extreme modification.

In the fits cited above, Dostoyevsky noted with precision the disturbing symptoms characteristic of the obsessive cloudy state after the fit.

In its globby piled-on redness, it was a scarlet letter embroidered by an obsessive compulsive.