detective

Other forms of detective

plural

detectives·

Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.

Questions about detective

What does detective mean?

detective means "a police officer who investigates crimes". That is the primary sense; the word has 2 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in detective?

detective has 3 syllables: de-tec-tive. The stress falls on "tec". In IPA it is /dɪˈtɛktɪv/.

What is another word for detective?

Close synonyms include investigator, tec, police detective. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is detective a common word?

detective is banded "Core" — among the few thousand words that carry most english. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.

What rhymes with detective?

1 word rhymes with detective. Rhymes are matched on the phonemes from the last stressed vowel onward, which is the definition a reader has in their head.