conative means of or pertaining to a striving action. It carries an Arena rating of 1612, earned across 5 head-to-head judged battles.
Among words judged in Lexicurio's Arena, conative ranks #2,324 of 17,138 for Most Incisive Words, #5,327 of 17,126 for Most Elegant Words, #6,084 of 17,151 for The Improbable, #6,763 of 17,142 for Most Ingenious Words.
conative is pronounced /ˈkəʊn.ə.tɪv/.
Why “conative” is a great word
Pertaining to the mental faculty of will, effort, and striving toward action. From Latin cōnāt-, past participle stem of cōnārī ("to attempt, to endeavor") + the English suffix -ive. First recorded in English use 1680–90. Unlike "cognitive," which maps the terrain of thought and knowledge, or "affective," which charts the weather of feeling, conative describes the engine of volition itself. It is the silent force in the climber’s reaching hand, the student’s late-night focus over a stubborn text, the simple, dogged act of rising from a chair when weariness weighs every limb—the often-unseen current that translates intention into the fragile, tangible world.
Etymology
From Latin conatio (“an act of attempting”).
adj
- Of or pertaining to a striving action.
noun
- An utterance that implies striving.e.g.“The conative, as opposed to the cognitive or affective, relates to purposeful, but not necessarily ultimately rational, action.”
Definitions & examples from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 3.0).
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