Meaning & use
preventative
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Meanings
adjectivebefore a noun
Intended to stop something unwanted, such as illness, damage or crime, from happening in the first place.
Grammar: Usually comes before a noun: preventative care, preventative measures.
Patterns
- preventative measures against something
- preventative care
Regular exercise is a preventative step against heart problems.
The city took preventative measures before the storm arrived.
She takes vitamins as a preventative treatment during winter.
nouncountable
Something, such as a medicine or action, used to stop a problem before it starts.
Grammar: Countable: a preventative against infection.
Patterns
- a preventative against something
- a preventative for something
Sunscreen is a simple preventative against sunburn.
Doctors often use vaccines as a preventative for serious diseases.
He gave the plants a spray as a preventative against aphids.
Word forms
| plural | preventatives |
|---|
Common combinations
- preventative measures
- Preventative measures can save you from costly repairs.
- preventative care
- Preventative care includes regular checkups and screenings.
- preventative maintenance
- Preventative maintenance keeps the machines running smoothly.
- preventative action
- The council took preventative action to stop flooding.
- preventative medicine
- She studies preventative medicine at a public health school.
Synonyms and how they differ
- preventive
- It is the shorter, slightly more formal version and is generally preferred in careful writing.
- precautionary
- It stresses being careful against a possible risk instead of stopping a particular thing.
- prophylactic
- It is a medical or technical word, especially for treatments that guard against disease.
- protective
- It means giving shelter from harm, and does not stress acting beforehand.
Opposites
Word family
- prevent verb
- to stop something from happening
- prevention noun
- the act of stopping something
- preventable adjective
- able to be stopped
- preventive adjective
- the shorter standard variant
- preventively adverb
- in a way that prevents
Commonly confused: preventative or preventive?
preventative vs preventive
Preventive and preventative mean the same thing; both are correct, but preventive is shorter and more common.
Practice
Which is an example of a preventative measure?
Choose one answer.
A flu vaccine acts before illness to stop it, which is preventative. The other options are responses after a problem has already occurred.
Make it your own
Write a sentence using “preventative”, then check it and compare it with the examples above.