RADICAL


Meaning of RADICAL in English

■ adjective

1》 relating to or affecting the fundamental nature of something.

↘innovative or progressive.

2》 (of surgery) thorough and intended to be completely curative.

3》 advocating thorough political or social reform; politically extreme.

↘ Brit. historical belonging to an extreme section of the Liberal party in the 19th century.

4》 Mathematics of the root of a number or quantity.

5》 denoting or relating to the roots of a word.

6》 Music belonging to the root of a chord.

7》 Botany of or coming from the root or stem base of a plant.

8》 N. Amer. informal excellent.

■ noun

1》 an advocate of ~ political or social reform.

2》 Chemistry a group of atoms behaving as a unit in a number of compounds. See also free ~ .

3》 the root or base form of a word.

↘any of the basic set of Chinese characters constituting semantically or functionally significant elements in the composition of other characters.

4》 Mathematics a quantity forming or expressed as the root of another.

Derivatives

~ism noun

~ization or ~isation noun

~ize or ~ise verb

~ly adverb

~ness noun

Origin

ME: from late L. ~is , from L. radix , radic- 'root'.

Concise Oxford English vocab.      Сжатый оксфордский словарь английского языка.