transformative

adjective

trans·​for·​ma·​tive tran(t)s-ˈfȯr-mə-tiv 

: causing or able to cause an important and lasting change in someone or something

a transformative experience

And she'll tell anyone who asks about her transformative weeks working for UNICEF in Congo and Cambodia.

—S. L. Price

It is increasingly hard to escape the conclusion that American politics has entered one of those rare transformative moments that shape the content of our public discourse and the direction of our governance for generations.

—Doug Ireland

Example Sentences

Recent Examples on the Web

AlphaFold—which DeepMind has made freely available along with a database that contains predicted structures for almost every protein known to biology—has been transformative. —Jeremy Kahn, Fortune, 28 Apr. 2023

Getting immersed in a virtual world through a headset that provides video and audio is one thing, but adding in touch is somehow transformative; physical interaction brings you into that virtual world in a much more direct way. —IEEE Spectrum, 22 Apr. 2023

His vision for the county economically is transformative. —ABC News, 16 Apr. 2023

In other words, for art to be transformative, artists need something to transform—perhaps something out of their own heads. —Ellen Wexler, Smithsonian Magazine, 10 Mar. 2023

Their scientific approach to lifestyle changes has been transformative. —Ananya Bhattacharya, Quartz, 7 Mar. 2023

For Greg Rice, ketamine was transformative. —Chris Hamby, New York Times, 20 Feb. 2023

But physicists can be forgiven for overlooking the potentially transformative ideas within, as the volumes appear simultaneously amateurish and intimidating. —Charlie Wood, Quanta Magazine, 6 Apr. 2023

The bank’s economists also argued that it could be transformative for productivity and GDP growth. —Bloomberg, Fortune, 5 Apr. 2023

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Word History

First Known Use

1668, in the meaning defined above