ABORTIVE

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does abortive mean? 

• ABORTIVE (adjective)
  The adjective ABORTIVE has 1 sense:

1. failing to accomplish an intended result

  Familiarity information: ABORTIVE used as an adjective is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• ABORTIVE (adjective)

Sense 1

Meaning:

Failing to accomplish an intended result

Synonyms:

abortive; stillborn; unsuccessful

Context example:

a stillborn plot to assassinate the President

Similar:

unfruitful (not fruitful; not conducive to abundant production)

Derivation:

abort (terminate before completion)

 Context examples 

He added, “that nature was degenerated in these latter declining ages of the world, and could now produce only small abortive births, in comparison of those in ancient times.”

(Gulliver's Travels into several remote nations of the world, by Jonathan Swift)

Only at the third did our visit prove abortive.

(The Return of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

The afforestation of the district, however, and its conversion into a royal demesne had clipped off a large section of his estate, while other parts had been confiscated as a punishment for his supposed complicity in an abortive Saxon rising.

(The White Company, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

By one of those caprices of the mind which we are perhaps most subject to in early youth, I at once gave up my former occupations, set down natural history and all its progeny as a deformed and abortive creation, and entertained the greatest disdain for a would-be science which could never even step within the threshold of real knowledge.

(Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)

What he had told me, in his room, about his belief in its disseminating the statements pasted on it, which were nothing but old leaves of abortive Memorials, might have been a fancy with him sometimes; but not when he was out, looking up at the kite in the sky, and feeling it pull and tug at his hand.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

One of these virtuosi seemed to think that I might be an embryo, or abortive birth.

(Gulliver's Travels into several remote nations of the world, by Jonathan Swift)

His eyes glanced momentarily at me and his lips parted with an abortive attempt at a laugh.

(The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald)

No—Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.

(The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald)