transitive

Etymology

From Latin trānsitīvus, from trānsitus, from trāns (“across”) + itus, from eō (“to go”).

adj

1. Making a transit or passage.
   For all symbols are fluxional; all language is vehicular and transitive, and is good, as ferries and horses are, for conveyance, not as farms and houses are, for homestead. 1841-1843, Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Poet
2. Affected by transference of signification.
   By far the greater part of the transitive or derivative applications of words depend on casual and unaccountable caprices of the feelings or the fancy. 1843, John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive
3. (grammar, of a verb) Taking a direct object or objects.
   The English verb "to notice" is a transitive verb, because we say things like "She noticed a problem".
   Men have tried to turn "revolutionise" from a transitive to an intransitive verb. 1908, G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
4. (set theory, of a relation on a set) Having the property that if an element a is related to b and b is related to c, then a is necessarily related to c.
   "Is an ancestor of" is a transitive relation: if Alice is an ancestor of Bob, and Bob is an ancestor of Carol, then Alice is an ancestor of Carol.
5. (algebra, of a group action) Such that, for any two elements of the acted-upon set, some group element maps the first to the second.
6. (graph theory, of a graph) Such that, for any two vertices there exists an automorphism which maps one to the other.

noun

1. (grammar) A transitive verb.
   This means that subcategorization properties do not allow us to distinguish between transitives and intransitives (both types of verbs are allowed, but not obliged, to take a direct object). 2011, Carmen Dobrovie-Sorin, The Syntax of Romanian: Comparative Studies in Romance, page 136