ameliorative

adj

1. Able to repair or ameliorate.

   “One night while he was moaning on about his sorry existence I said: Do you really want to change it? Of course I do, he said, but nothing I’ve tried has been ameliorative.”

2. Suggesting or relating to a positive or approving evaluation.

   “[…]personal nicknames can generally be divided into positively marked (ameliorative) ones, usually given by family members and friends as a sign of affection and acceptance, and those negatively marked (pejorative or derogatory), whose aim is to mock or ridicule a person[…]”

3. Of or relating to conceptual engineering, the normative study of which conceptual demarcation is most conducive to solve the problems the concept is a priori taken to solve.

   “ameliorative inquiry”

   “ameliorative analysis”

   “ameliorative project”

noun

1. That which betters or improves.

   “With such conventional Keynesian amelioratives, the economy normally recovers with output and employment on the rise, and, unfortunately, with inflation picking up too.”

   “It certainly means the stripping from Parliament of endless debates on niggling parsimonies and trivial amelioratives; the thousand and one unreal fights and distractions which has kept democracy from winning the other half of freedom.”

2. (rare)A linguistic unit (such as a word, morpheme) that implies a positive or approving evaluation.

   “Moreover, diminutives, augmentatives, pejoratives and amelioratives have always been analysed as independent categories, neglecting the possible interrelations among them.”