different between provocative vs aggressive

English

Etymology

Borrowed from Middle French provocatif, and its source, Late Latin provocativus, from Latin provocare.

Pronunciation

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /p???v?k.?.t?v/
• (General American) IPA^(key): /p???v?k.?.t?v/

Adjective

provocative (comparative more provocative, superlative most provocative)

1. Serving or tending to elicit a strong, often negative sentiment in another person; exasperating.
2. Serving or tending to excite, stimulate or arouse sexual interest; sexy.

Related terms

• provoke
• provocation
• provocator

Related terms

• provocateur

Translations

Noun

provocative (plural provocatives)

1. (obsolescent) Something that provokes an appetite, especially a sexual appetite; an aphrodisiac. [from 15th c.]
   • 1723, Charles Walker, Memoirs of the Life of Sally Salisbury:

     She used by way of Provocative, to read the wanton Verses of her Paramour in the day time [...].

Latin

Adjective

pr?voc?t?ve

1. vocative masculine singular of pr?voc?t?vus

English

Etymology

From aggress +? -ive. Compare with French agressif.

Pronunciation

• (US) IPA^(key): /?????s.?v/
• Rhymes: -?s?v

Adjective

aggressive (comparative more aggressive, superlative most aggressive)

1. Characterized by aggression; unjustly attacking; prone to behave in a way that involves attacking or arguing.

   an aggressive policy, war, person, nation

   • 2011, Judith S. Weis, Do Fish Sleep?, Rutgers University Press (?ISBN), page 63:

     When a new aggressive fish is added to an aquarium with an already-established, territorial fish, the established fish will probably fight to protect its territory (the whole tank).

2. (programming) Of heuristics, source code optimization techniques, etc.: exploiting every opportunity to be applied.
   • 1996, Tibor Gyimothy, Compiler Construction: 6th International Conference, CC '96, Linköping, Sweden, April 24 - 26, 1996. Proceedings, Volume 6, Springer ?ISBN, page 59

     This paper describes how aggressive loop unrolling is done in a retargetable optimizing compiler.

   • 2001, Paul Feautrier (edited by Santosh Pande and Dharma P. Agrawal), Compiler Optimizations for Scalable Parallel Systems, Springer ?ISBN, page 173

     Since the most aggressive type of optimization a program can be subjected to is parallelization, understanding a program before attempting to parallelize it is a very important step.

   • 2002, Y. N. Srikant, Priti Shankar, The Compiler Design Handbook: Optimizations and Machine Code Generation, CRC Press ?ISBN, page 465

     However, aggressive compiler techniques such as loop unrolling, promoting of subscripted array variables into registers (especially in of subscripted array variables into registers (especially in loops) and interprocedural optimizations create heavy register pressure and it is still quite important to do a good job of register allocation.

   • 2002, Shpeisman, T. ; Lueh, G.-Y. ; Adl-Tabatabai, A.-R., PACT 2002: 2002 International Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques : proceedings : 22-25 September, 2002, Charlottesville, Virginia, USA, IEEE Computer Society Press ?ISBN, page 249

     The Itanium processor is an example of an Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing (EPIC) architecture and thus relies on aggressive and expensive compiler optimizations for performance.

   • 2003, Susanna Pelagatti (edited by Fethi Rabhi and Sergei Gorlatch), Patterns and Skeletons for Parallel and Distributed Computing, Springer ?ISBN, page 182

     This sensibly eases the programmer task and allows for more aggressive optimisations of the global program structure.

   • 2011, Wen-mei W. Hwu, GPU Computing Gems Jade Edition, Elsevier ?ISBN, page 11

     The CUDA C code for the GPU, as well as the C and inline assembly code for the CPU, were highly optimized and aggressive compiler optimizations (-O4) were turned on.

3. (pathology, of a tumour or disease) That spreads quickly or extensively; virulent; malignant.

Synonyms

• See also Thesaurus:combative

Antonyms

• passive

Derived terms

Related terms

Translations

Further reading

• aggressive in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam, 1913.
• aggressive in The Century Dictionary, New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., 1911.

German

Adjective

aggressive

1. inflection of aggressiv:
   1. strong/mixed nominative/accusative feminine singular
   2. strong nominative/accusative plural
   3. weak nominative all-gender singular
   4. weak accusative feminine/neuter singular

Italian

Adjective

aggressive f pl

1. feminine plural of aggressivo

Norwegian Bokmål

Adjective

aggressive

1. definite singular of aggressiv
2. plural of aggressiv

Norwegian Nynorsk

Adjective

aggressive

1. definite singular of aggressiv
2. plural of aggressiv

Swedish

Adjective

aggressive

1. absolute definite natural masculine form of aggressiv.