Adjective: legitimate
Comparison Forms
Synthetic
Perifrastic
| Comparative | more legitimate |
| Superlative | most legitimate |
Sample Sentences
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Rodwell was sent off by referee Martin Atkinson - who has shown 15 red cards since the start of last season - after 23 minutes for what appeared to be a legitimate challenge on Suarez. [2011 October 1, Phil McNulty, “Everton 0 - 2 Liverpool”, in BBC Sport:]
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According to the tweet, the encounter began with "a traffic stop for unlawful speed." If so, then the initial stop was legitimate, but in and of itself that wouldn't be probable cause to search the car. It does give an officer the right to look inside, and if contraband is in plain view, that would be probable cause. Here we don't know whether the bag full of drugs marked "BAG FULL OF DRUGS" was laying out in plain view, but it seems entirely possible. [2020 February 5, Kevin Underhill, “Bag Marked "Bag Full of Drugs" Allegedly Full of Drugs”, in Lowering the Bar, archived from the original on 16 Dec 2022:]
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legitimate reasoning; a legitimate standard or method
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Tillotson still keeps his place as a legitimate English classic. [1849–1861, Thomas Babington Macaulay, The History of England from the Accession of James the Second, volume (please specify |volume=I to V), London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, →OCLC:]
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legitimate poems of Chaucer; legitimate inscriptions
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The truth is, when we fail to protect legitimate rights of others and continue to expand the net of lies and defamation, every one would become victims one day including ourselves. [2020 December 20, Wen Sirui, “The Danger of One Voice from Mainstream Media”, in Minghui:]
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Besides his four legitimate wives, the caliph had dozens of concubines.
Adjectives inflected like legitimate
priest-ridden,
unreposed,
evadible,
dissentious,
dissentient,
unforesighted,
egocentrical,
unephemeral,
unennobling,
mensuralist,
flocculent,
unseductive,
whoopsy,
whooshy,
surrogate,
Nicodian,
unrepaired,
prismatoidal,
renorenal,
unseducible, etc. (List truncated at 20 adjectives)
Etymology
1. From Middle English legitimat, legytymat, from Medieval Latin lēgitimātus, perfect passive participle of Latin lēgitimō (“to make legal”) (see -ate (adjective-forming suffix)), from Latin lēgitimus (“lawful”), originally "fixed by law, in line with the law," from Latin lēx (“law”). Originally "lawfully begotten".
2. The noun was derived from the adjective within English or earlier by substantivization (see -ate (noun-forming suffix)), the verb from the adjective by conversion (see -ate (verb-forming suffix)). See: Latin Adjectives '
lēgitimus'.