cultivés

Cultivés is the masculine plural form of the French adjective cultivé, meaning cultivated or cultured. As an adjective, it describes things that have been developed or refined through cultivation, practice, or education. It can apply to tastes, knowledge, arts, or manners, and when used with a noun, the adjective agrees in gender and number, as in des individus cultivés or un public cultivé.

In social and cultural contexts, the noun phrase les cultivés may refer to people regarded as educated or cultured. The term is generally neutral, but its connotation can vary with context, potentially signaling a distinction between groups defined by education, taste, or cultural capital.

In botany and agriculture, cultivés can describe plants that have been cultivated rather than growing wild. However, for precision, technical terms such as cultivar or variétés cultivées are commonly used to denote specific cultivated varieties. In everyday language, cultivés remains a broad descriptor rather than a specific category.

Etymology traces cultivés to the verb cultiver, meaning to cultivate, itself from Latin cultivare. The feminine form is cultivée and the plural feminine cultivées. Usage notes emphasize that the term is versatile but context-dependent: it can refer to cultivated people, cultivated fields, or cultivated plants, with more exact terminology preferred in scientific or formal writing.