OPPRESSIVE

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does oppressive mean? 

• OPPRESSIVE (adjective)
  The adjective OPPRESSIVE has 2 senses:

1. weighing heavily on the senses or spirit

2. marked by unjust severity or arbitrary behavior

  Familiarity information: OPPRESSIVE used as an adjective is rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• OPPRESSIVE (adjective)

Sense 1

Meaning:

Weighing heavily on the senses or spirit

Context example:

oppressive sorrows

Similar:

heavy (marked by great psychological weight; weighted down especially with sadness or troubles or weariness)

Derivation:

oppressiveness (unwelcome burdensome difficulty)

Sense 2

Meaning:

Marked by unjust severity or arbitrary behavior

Synonyms:

oppressive; tyrannical; tyrannous

Context example:

tyrannous disregard of human rights

Similar:

domineering (tending to domineer)

Derivation:

oppress (come down on or keep down by unjust use of one's authority)

oppress (cause to suffer)

oppressiveness (a feeling of being oppressed)

 Context examples 

I remember pausing once, with a kind of sorrow that was not all oppressive, not quite despairing.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

The air was oppressive; it seemed as if there was some sulphurous fume, which at times made me dizzy.

(Dracula, by Bram Stoker)

The light became more and more oppressive to me, and the heat wearying me as I walked, I sought a place where I could receive shade.

(Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)

English verdure, English culture, English comfort, seen under a sun bright, without being oppressive.

(Emma, by Jane Austen)

By midday the irk of his pack became too oppressive.

(Love of Life and Other Stories, by Jack London)

A shower of rain fell while we were in the train, and the heat was far less oppressive in Croydon than in town.

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

It was sultry and oppressive, reminding me of what the old Californians term “earthquake weather.”

(The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London)

It was midday before we had made ourselves secure, but the heat was not oppressive, and the general character of the plateau, both in its temperature and in its vegetation, was almost temperate.

(The Lost World, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

Whether advocates and orators had liberty to plead in causes manifestly known to be unjust, vexatious, or oppressive?

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

She sat in a blaze of oppressive heat, in a cloud of moving dust, and her eyes could only wander from the walls, marked by her father's head, to the table cut and notched by her brothers, where stood the tea-board never thoroughly cleaned, the cups and saucers wiped in streaks, the milk a mixture of motes floating in thin blue, and the bread and butter growing every minute more greasy than even Rebecca's hands had first produced it.

(Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen)