Tending to cause something to stop or cease.
Formed from 'desist' with the suffix '-ive' (meaning 'tending to' or 'having the quality of'), a productive suffix in English for creating adjectives from verbs.
The '-ive' suffix creates a really useful grammatical category in English—it transforms action words into descriptors of tendency, which is why we can talk about 'desistive forces' that make things stop rather than just 'desisting' by choice.
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