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Definition
important or significant in quantityA comprehensive dictionary will have more specialized definitions of substantive including meanings common in Law and Grammar.
- The rote answer is that the Supreme Court has no business striking down democratically enacted (though perhaps unwise) laws, least of all under fanciful theories of substantive due process.Michael S. Greve -- How to Think about Constitutional Change, Part II -- http://www.aei.org/publications/filter.all,pubID.22622/pub_detail.asp (retrieved 06/29/06)
- At the time they were described as administrative and procedural rather than substantive; but taken together they have resulted in the most profound changes in U.S. patent policy and practice since 1836.Adam Jaffe and Josh Lerner -- Innovation and Its Discontents -- http://www.aei-brookings.org/policy/page.php?id=250 (retrieved 06/29/06)
- We did not discuss substantive issues, so much as history and South African culture.Nelson Mandela -- Long Walk to Freedom
- The Chairman said, "What is your substantive field?"Robert M. Pirsig -- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
- Perhaps his exalted appreciation of the merits of the old girl causes him usually to make the noun-substantive "goodness" of the feminine gender.Charles Dickens -- Bleak House
- Ideas almost refuse to be expressed in these substantives which are fugitives from justice.Victor Hugo -- Les Miserables
- Meanwhile, there remain the more serious substantive matters.Tim O'Brien -- Going After Cacciato
- I stick at everything beyond a noun-substantive—and I stick at him, if he's at all a tight one.'Charles Dickens -- Little Dorrit
- Am I substantively correct?Robert Ludlum -- The Bourne Identity
- I just used a few code words that triggered responses from Armbruster and Ambassador Atkinson in London, nothing substantive.Robert Ludlum -- The Bourne Ultimatum
- Neut. pl. of participle used as substantive.Thomas Wolfe -- Look Homeward, Angel
- I only wish I had an excellent answer, something pithy and substantive, maybe with a little alliteration, but instead I have one that's merely short.Thomas C. Foster -- How to Read Literature Like a Professor
- Most of the questions were substantive and academic, until she was thrown a curve.Jodi Picoult -- Nineteen Minutes
- B-o-t, bot, t-i-n, tin, bottin, n-e-y, ney, bottinney, noun substantive, a knowledge of plants.Charles Dickens -- Nicholas Nickleby
- The People's Republic will never substantively touch Hong Kong!Robert Ludlum -- The Bourne Supremacy
- The Albino is as well made as other men—has no substantive deformity—and yet this mere aspect of all-pervading whiteness makes him more strangely hideous than the ugliest abortion.Herman Melville -- Moby Dick
- Many who knew her, thought it a pity that so substantive and rare a creature should have been absorbed into the life of another, and be only known in a certain circle as a wife and mother.George Eliot -- Middlemarch
- Still, Pearson had to be more mindful of the concerns of black residents than at the beginning of his career—even if that mindfulness didn't translate into any substantive changes during his tenure.Bryan Stevenson -- Just Mercy
- However, I felt like a schoolmaster amidst children, and persisted, and presently I had a score of noun substantives at least at my command; and then I got to demonstrative pronouns, and even the verb "to eat."H.G. Wells -- The Time Machine
- We would not wish to mislead our readers in their conceptions of any of our characters, and we therefore feel it necessary to add that the adjective, in the preceding agnomen of Mr. Van der School, was used in direct reference to its substantive.James Fenimore Cooper -- The Pioneers