operative

1. 1.

   a person secretly employed in espionage for a government

   Synonymssecret agentintelligence officerintelligence agent

   Broaderagent

   Narroweragent-in-placeagent provocateurbridge agentcase officercodetalkerfootNOCspywalk-in
2. 2.

   someone who can be employed as a detective to collect information

   Synonymsprivate detectivePIprivate eyeprivate investigatorshamussherlock

   Broaderdetective

   Narrowerhotel detectiveinquiry agentstore detective

Other forms of operative

plural

operatives·

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 operative

What does operative mean?

operative means "being in force or having or exerting force". That is the primary sense; the word has 6 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in operative?

operative has 4 syllables: o-pe-ra-tive. The stress falls on "o". In IPA it is /ˈɑpɚətɪv/.

What is another word for operative?

Close synonyms include surgical, running, functional, working, secret agent. 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.

What is the opposite of operative?

The recorded antonyms are inoperative.

Is operative a common word?

operative is banded "Familiar" — widely understood, used when the subject calls for it. 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 operative?

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