constitutive.

Helping make something what it is through an essential part or defining condition.

Use it for

Words that belong together

• constitutive rule
• constitutive element

On the page

The constitutive rule defined what counted as a valid move.

Participation was treated as a constitutive element of the institution.

Usage notes

Primary category: academic / formal. Forms: Normally relational or categorical; comparison only where the particular property admits gradation. Legacy lexical fields mirror sense 1 only. Use numbered sense fields for all meanings. Established modern English lexical item. No separate regional spelling or grammatical inflection entry. Writing functions: formal properties, scope and scale, organizational relations, analytic representation. Disciplines: academic writing, formal methods, cross-disciplinary analysis. Commonness: moderately common.