regulative.

Serving to regulate conduct, operation or judgment.

Use it for

Words that belong together

• regulative principle
• regulative rule

On the page

The regulative rule constrained how the established activity was performed.

The principle was regulative rather than descriptive of an observed mechanism.

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: uncommon.