Definition of "explicative" [ex•pli•ca•tive]

• Serving to explain; explanatory. (adjective)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "The former may be called explicative, the latter augmentative judgements; because the former add in the predicate nothing to the conception of the subject, but only analyse it into its constituent conceptions, which were thought already in the subject, although in a confused manner; the latter add to our conceptions of the subject a predicate which was not contained in it, and which no analysis could ever have discovered therein."
• "He writes lyrics that will reward the kind of explicative analysis usually accorded to the finest of poets."
• "Mr. Bengtson has written two books pairing photographic studies with explicative prose on the locations depicted in the films of Chaplin and Keaton ."