Showing or feeling sympathy and concern for the suffering of others; compassionate.
Formed from compassion with the suffix -ive (meaning 'having the quality of'). This is a less common variant of compassionate, using a different adjectival suffix common in Latin-derived words.
While 'compassive' appears in some historical texts and medical literature, it never won the popularity contest against 'compassionate'—a reminder that in language, the first widely-adopted form often eliminates its competitors, even if both are equally logical.
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