rejective

Rejective is an adjective meaning characterized by rejection, or relating to the act of rejecting something. The term derives from the Latin rejectus, the past participle of reicere “to throw back,” and entered English via Old French and Middle English. It is used both in general language and in specialized fields to describe processes, attitudes, or phenomena that involve turning away or discarding.

In linguistics, rejective consonants refer to a class of sounds produced with a closed glottis and a glottalic egressive airstream mechanism. In many descriptions these sounds are called ejectives; some sources use the term rejective as an alternative. They occur in certain Caucasian languages and in Armenian, among others, and are typically described as voiceless and percussive in their articulation. In contemporary phonology, ejective is the more common label, but rejective appears in older literature and some descriptive grammars.

In statistics, rejective sampling (also called conditional Poisson sampling) is a method used to obtain a fixed-size sample from a finite population. The approach begins with a Poisson-type design and then conditions on the total number of selected units, effectively “rejecting” samples that do not meet the size constraint. This method balances variable inclusion probabilities with the requirement of a specified sample size and is used in survey sampling applications.

General usage: as an adjective, rejective can describe policies, judgments, or procedures that emphasize refusal or dismissal, such as a rejective stance toward proposals or a rejective screening criterion in a selection process.