Derivative

Derivative

/dəˈrivədiv/

adjective

1) resulting from derivation

“A derivative work must incorporate some or all of a preexisting ‘work’ and add new original copyrightable authorship to that work.”

— U.S. Copyright Office

2) copied or adapted from others

“Calling something “derivative” isn’t necessarily a knock. Lots of bands are derivative in ways that expand the sound they’re copping.”

— Marc Masters

noun

3) something derived

“The findings [of the study] indicated that verb derivative form statistically and significantly predicted the reading comprehension most.”

— Md Kamrul Hasan and colleagues

4) a word formed from another by derivation

“That the English language may be more easily understood, it is necessary to inquire how its derivative words are deduced from their primitives, and how the primitives are borrowed from other languages.”

— Samuel Johnson (1709 – 1784)

5) (in math) the limit, as the increment in the argument of a function approaches zero, of the ratio of the increment in its value to the corresponding increment in the argument: the instantaneous rate of change of a function with respect to a variable

“The derivative is the slope of the tangent line to the graph of f ( x ) f(x), assuming the tangent line exists.”

— Penn State

6) (in chemistry) a compound derived or obtained from known or hypothetical substances and containing essential elements of the parent substance

“There is a commonly-held view that only ‘first-order’ derivatives should be considered; substances that can be created from a parent structure in a single chemical reaction.”

― Royal Society of Chemistry