▪ I. creative, n.
Brit. /krɪˈeɪtɪv/, U.S. /kriˈeɪdɪv/
[‹ creative adj.]
1. The creative faculty; creative work; (Advertising) creative material produced for an advertising campaign, such as the copy, design, or artwork.
| 1903 Westm. Gaz. 3 June 5/2 It may be observed that the development of the critical creative is somewhat inimical to the purely creative, as appears from the case of the author of ‘Emilia Galotti’ and ‘Nathan der Weise’. 1987 Bottomline Nov. 35/1 Good creative for bank advertising is similar to any other creative. 1989 New Yorker 15 May 41 (caption) Bruce, you look fabulous! Who's doing your creative? 1993 Chicago Tribune 29 Jan. iii. 4/2 Icon Marketing, a Chicago-based firm, was identified as providing the creative behind the spots, with Turner doing the production. 2001 Revolution 1 Aug. 5/4 Youth web site TheSite.org is using ‘in-your-face’ ads to drive users to the service... The creative was designed by agency Digital Outlook. |
2. A creative person, a person whose job involves creative work; (Advertising) a person who carries out creative work on an advertising campaign, esp. a copywriter, art director, or designer.
| 1938T. Dreiser in W. S. Maugham Of Human Bondage (new ed.) I. p. v, Life..is our best novelist and our best biographer... Only it does not write them [sc. novels and biographies]—except and perforce..through one of its creations or creatives. 1965 Listener 20 May 747/1 May not teachers be thought of as creatives manqué rather than failed doers? 1970 New Yorker 12 Sept. 29/2 (advt.) The media used will be those that ‘creatives’ consider their own. 1989 Campaign 21 Apr. 5/3 Planners write the brief on screen, creatives read it, then visualise and copywrite on one of the various enhanced computer graphics systems. 2000 M. Johnson Drop iii. 160 Could you send a portfolio over, a client list and such?.. And could you tell me the name of the head creative? Thank you. |
▪ II. creative, a.
(kriːˈeɪtɪv)
[f. create v. + -ive.]
1. a. Having the quality of creating, given to creating; of or pertaining to creation; originative.
| 1678 Cudworth Intell. Syst. (1808) II. 317 This Divine, miraculous, creative power. 1745 W. Thompson Sickness i. (R.) Creative bard [Spenser]..expand thy fairy scenes. c 1750 Shenstone Ruin'd Abbey 332 Heav'n's creative hand. 1874 Green Short Hist. iv. 164 There is no trace of creative genius or originality in his character. |
b. Spec. of literature and art, thus also of a writer or artist: inventive (cf. invention 3 b), imaginative; exhibiting imagination as well as intellect, and thus differentiated from the merely critical, ‘academic’, journalistic, professional, mechanical, etc., in literary or artistic production. So creative writing, such writing; also freq. in the U.S. as a course of study.
| 1816 Wordsworth Thanksgiving Ode 30 Creative Art..Demands the service of a mind and heart..Heroically fashioned. 1876 Geo. Eliot Dan. Der. II. iii. xxii. 73 A creative artist is no more a mere musician than a great statesman is a mere politician. 1900 W. B. Worsfold Judgment in Lit. iii. 25 Aristotle has once and for all characterised the method of creative literature, and distinguished such literature from all other branches of letters. 1903 A. Bennett Truth about Author iii. 29 It was eight years since I sat down as a creative artist. 1907 G. K. Chesterton in Dickens Pickw. p. viii, In creative art the essence of a book exists before the book... The creative writer laughs at his comedy before he creates it. 1917 J. E. Spingarn (title) Creative criticism. 1922 Holliday & Van Rensselaer Business of Writing 100 Then, actually, there is comparatively small demand for creative writing. 1930 English Jrnl. XIX. 635 Courses in creative writing. 1934 New Republic 29 Aug. 84/2 Conrad Aiken, who received a Pulitzer award in poetry and holds a Guggenheim fellowship in creative writing, is now in England. 1938 W. S. Maugham Summing Up 232 One of the reasons why current criticism is so useless is that it is done as a side-issue by creative writers. 1942 Times Lit. Suppl. 29 Aug. 427/1 Creative literature deals directly with life. 1958 Oxf. Mag. 4 Dec. 164/2 In America..established, or at any rate committed, writers have been absorbed, permanently or temporarily, into the apparatus of creative writing workshops. 1960 C. H. Dodd Authority of Bible (ed. 2) i. 32 The creative artist, who would scorn slavish imitation, yet finds inspiration and direction in the masters. |
c. creative evolution [tr. Fr. L'{Eacu}volution créatrice (H. L. Bergson 1907)]: in Bergson's philosophy, the process of evolution of new forms regarded as not taking place according to natural laws but giving rise to genuine novelty; hence creative evolutionist. Also creative synthesis.
| 1909 Proc. Arist. Soc. IX. 41 The special title of the book ‘Creative Evolution’. 1918 G. B. Shaw Doctors' Delusions (1932) 312 The Creative Evolutionists, with Butler and Bergson for their prophets. 1921 ― Back to Methus. p. lxxviii, Creative Evolution is already a religion, and is indeed now unmistakably the religion of the twentieth century. 1934 ― Prefaces 364/2 Myself..who believe in the religion of Creative Evolution. 1941 Mind L. 397 The concept of creative synthesis, according to which by the interaction of parts in a whole, there emerge ‘new properties’ qualifying the whole, which were not present in the constituent parts. |
d. Extended uses (chiefly of b).
| 1930 Monotype Recorder XXIX. 39 The fear that prices will drop still lower when trade in general seems to be poor can no longer have power over the creative salesman, because he realizes that salesmanship definitely stimulates and helps to stabilize trade. Ibid., The remainder..fail to see the vital necessity for advertising and establishing a creative sales policy. 1933 Dylan Thomas Let. Oct. (1966) 45 Aren't any of the Creative Lifers men of action? 1936 Word Study Sept. 1/2 At a recent ‘panel discussion’ in one of our great universities several speakers aired their views on ‘creative education’. 1937 ‘G. Orwell’ Road to Wigan Pier xii. 230 In my spare time I want to do something ‘creative’, so I choose to do a bit of carpentering. 1941 Time (Air Exp. Ed.) 14 July 2/1 The creative pauses of Adolf Hitler. 1942 Sphere 27 June 409/1 The sub-editors here [at the B.B.C.] need to be more creative than in Fleet Street. 1958 Spectator 14 Feb. 197/1 ‘Creative’ commercial jobs, such as advertising, designing, modelling, public relations, TV production, or on a ‘glossy’ news-magazine. 1969 Times 13 Dec. 9/7 Middleclass mothers who leave a child alone with a roomful of creative toys all day may produce ‘C’ stream children as often as the working mother. |
e. Applied to financial or other strategies which are imaginative or ingenious, esp. in a misleading fashion. creative accountancy, creative accounting, the modification of accounts to achieve a desired end; falsification of accounts that is misleading but not illegal; also creative accountant.
| 1973 Harper's Mag. Aug. 72/2 The extent to which Equity Funding's earnings before 1970 were the result of ‘creative accounting’ is still unclear. 1973 New Yorker 20 Aug. 39/3 Losses, then, of three hundred billion dollars in a year or a half, spread over more than thirty million investors — such were the bitter fruits..of the works of corporate fiction written by the ‘creative’ accountants, who found ways of justifying fanciful figures on their clients' earnings statements. 1979 Economist 7 July 91/2 The purpose of unitary taxation is ostensibly to capture income which might otherwise, through creative transfer pricing, go untaxed or undertaxed in other jurisdictions. 1982 Times 12 July 11/8 Creative accounting may pretty up the books. But the stark reality is that an airline suffering losses of over {pstlg}450m in the past two years and hard pressed to earn a profit this time, is hardly a fund manager's dream. 1985 Times 27 July 2/4 Because of ‘creative accountancy’, used by high-spending boroughs, the GLC failed to take into account about {pstlg}140 million. 1986 Tribune 12 Sept. 3/2 The working party on local government finance will look first at the extent of creative accounting, particularly deferred purchase schemes, which councils have used to get round government restrictions. |
2. Affording the cause or occasion of, productive of.
| 1803 Med. Jrnl. IX. 272 Injuries..unattended by any symptoms creative of alarm. 1837 H. Martineau Soc. Amer. III. 130 Laws and customs cannot be creative of virtue: they may encourage and help to preserve it; but they cannot originate it. |
▸ creative sentencing n. Law (orig. and chiefly U.S.) the passing of an (often unorthodox or innovative) sentence as an alternative to imprisonment, esp. with the aim of linking the punishment to the crime committed; esp. a sentence which causes the offender to face the consequences of his or her actions or to make some form of retribution.
| 1975 Pacific Reporter 543 413/1 We are not unaware of the fact that the sentence review process has the potential of stifling *creative sentencing. This must not happen; appellate review must insure the quality of justice, not diminish it. 1982 N.Y. Times 6 June xi. 25 We urge judges to consider other creative sentencing options on a case-by-case basis, with jail always available as a last resort when other punishments fail. 2001 Sunday Mail (Glasgow) (Nexis) 28 Oct. At his court in..Ohio, Judge Hostetler said the overcrowded jail forced creative sentencing. He once made vandals..auction their possessions to pay for the damage. |