n. one of a number of things from which only one can be chosen; "what option did I have?"; "there no other alternative"; "my only choice is to refuse"

adj. necessitating a choice between mutually exclusive possibilities; "alternative possibilities were neutrality or war"

adj. pertaining to unconventional choices; "an alternative life style"

adj. serving or used in place of another; "an alternative plan"

n. the cognitive process whereby two or more stimuli are distinguished

n. refined taste; tact

n. a predisposition in favor of something; "a predilection for expensive cars"; "his sexual preferences"; "showed a Marxist orientation"

n. a strong liking; "my own preference is for good literature"; "the Irish have a penchant for blarney"

adj. under terms not final or fully worked out or agreed upon; "probationary employees"; "a provisional government"; "just a tentative schedule"

adj. acting as substitute for another

adj. providing or receiving nurture or parental care though not related by blood or legal ties; "foster parent"; "foster child"; "foster home"; "surrogate father"

adj. expressing antithesis or opposition; "the adversative conjunction `but' in `poor but happy'"

adj. syntactically establishing a relation of contrast between sentences or elements of a sentence; "disjunctive conjunctions like `but', `or', or `though' serve a contrastive function"

adj. serving to divide or marking a division; "the divisional line between two states"

adj. serving to separate or divide into parts; "partitive tendencies in education"; "the uniting influence was stronger than the separative"

adj. (used of an accent in Hebrew orthography) indicating that the word marked is separated to a greater or lesser degree rhythmically and grammatically from the word that follows it

adj. conspicuously or grossly unconventional or unusual; "restaurants of bizarre design--one like a hat, another like a rabbit"; "famed for his eccentric spelling"; "a freakish combination of styles"; "his off-the-wall antics"; "the outlandish clothes of teenagers"; "outre and affected stage antics"

adj. marked by a carefree unconventionality or disreputableness; "a cocktail party given by some...raffish bachelors"- Crary Moore

adj. informal terms; strikingly unconventional

adj. functioning in a supporting capacity; "the main library and its auxiliary branches"

adj. accompany, concomitant; "collateral target damage from a bombing run"

adj. derived from what is primary or original; not firsthand; "a secondhand report"; "a secondhand account of a memory of something once read"; "most of our knowledge is secondhand"

adj. being a replacement or substitute for a regular member of a team; "a second-string pitcher"

adj. paying tribute; "a tributary colony"

adj. capable of substituting in any of several positions on a team; "a utility infielder"

adj. suffered or done by one person as a substitute for another; "vicarious atonement"