a. [a. F. fictif, -ive, f. L. type *fictīv-us, f. fingĕre to fashion, FEIGN.]

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  1.  In active sense. † a. Given to feigning. Obs.

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c. 1491.  Chast. Goddes Chyld., 28. In goddes sighte they ben very fyctifs feyners.

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  b.  Adapted to or concerned with the creation of fiction; imaginatively creative.

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1865.  Macm. Mag., XIII. Dec., 156/1. Whenever a novelist or dramatist died, the personages, whom, by his fictive art he had called into being, met him on the threshold of the unseen world to greet him, as their creator, and to thank or curse him for his share in the fact of their existence.

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1889.  J. M. Robertson, Ess. towards Crit. Meth., 122. Charlotte Bronë as having a vivid imagination and great fictive faculty grafted on the philosophy of a spritied governess.

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  c.  Adapted to fashion or form; moulding. rare.

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1875.  L. Morris, The Food of Song, v.

        Too vast, too swift, too formless to inspire
The fictive hand, or touch the lips with fire.

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  2.  In passive sense, a. Originating in fiction, created by the imagination, fictitious. Of a name: Assumed.

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1612.  Drayton, Poly-olb., vi. 93.

        Time … to those things whose grounds were verie true,
Though naked yet and bare (not hauing to content
The weyward curious eare) gaue fictiue ornament.

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1837.  Fraser’s Mag., XV. 636/1. It must be some list of a party in the days of Louis XIV. … or else the names are fictive.

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1860.  Ld. Lytton, Lucile, II. IV. i. 60.

        When the Greek actor, acting Electra, wept over
The urn of Orestes, the theatre rose
And wept with him. What was there in such fictive woes
To thrill a whole theatre?

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  b.  Of a counterfeit or fictitious character, not real, feigned, sham.

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1855.  Tennyson, Brook, 93.

          What was it? less of sentiment than sense
Had Katie; not illiterate; nor of those
Who dabbling in the fount of fictive tears,
And nursed by mealy-mouth’d philanthropies,
Divorce the Feeling from her mate the Deed.

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1878.  Gladstone, Prim. Homer, 117. The fictive advice of Agamemnon to return home is taken in good earnest.

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