frictive

English

Adjective

frictive (comparative more frictive, superlative most frictive)

  1. Of, relating to, or caused by friction.

Synonyms

Noun

frictive (plural frictives)

  1. Any substance which increases friction.
    • 2000, Robert Brunner, Letters from Martin: Summer, 1252 A.D:
      The candler also offers his knowledge of various frictives and lotions that enhance and facilitate successful fornication.

Usage notes

Not to be confused with fricative.

Quotations

1843 "A stone-saw is not a saw at all. It is merely a piece of soft sheet-iron, with a blunt, smooth, straight edge, unprovided with teeth. Its action is not, properly speaking, to cut the stone, but to separate the particles of the material by friction. The effect is much increased by the addition of sand and water, the latter of which in some degree softens the stone, while the sharp particles of the former aid the frictive action of the saw; the small hard particles which constitute sand may indeed be deemed substitutes for the teeth of a saw." — George Dodd, Days at the Factories: Or, The Manufacturing Industry of Great Britain Described, Page 243.

1993 "Calculations stipulate the frictive or delaying force that hampers the motion of the projectile." — Thomas Richards, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire, →ISBN, Page 105.

2000 "When two masses of a single substance, or two masses of different substances, were briskly rubbed together, the temperature of both masses rose -- the case of friction; when one body percussed with another, the temperature of the receiver rose -- the case of percussion. For those who, along with Lavoisier, believed that heat was a substance, an acceptable metaphor for the observed increase in temperature invoked a metaphor about how the corpuscles of the frictive or percussed bodies were similar in structure to wool fibers or to sponges." — June Z. Fullmer, Young Humphry Davy: The Making of An Experimental Chemist, →ISBN, p. 55.

2000 "In order to play with a clear sound in a high register, the bow hair is positioned on the strings rather close to the bridge, where there is quite a bit of frictive resistance to the bow; as the pitches descend, the bow can be moved 'in,' again towards the body's center, a half-inch or so, and the strings' resistance diminishes considerably." — Elisabeth Le Guin, Boccherini's Body: an essay in carnal musicology, →ISBN, Page 18.

2004 "Commonly we have but a vague apprehension of the body as a whole; two or three centers of friction are about all that we can heed at once. But for physical purposes -- bodily preservation, nourishment, propulsion -- these are all that are necessary. Nature has accommodatingly specialized certain portions of the physical mechanism, the sense-organs, for the sole sake of keeping us in touch with reality at the salient frictive points." — Hartley Burr Alexander, Nature And Human Nature: Essays Metaphysical And Historical, →ISBN, p. 278.

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