# subjective

/səbˈdʒɛktɪv/ (US) · /sʌbdʒˈɛktɪv/ (UK)

Source: https://englishreference.com/word/subjective
Updated: 2026-06-20

## Senses

### 1. based on personal opinion

adjective · CEFR B2

based on your own feelings and opinions rather than on facts.

For teachers: pertaining to or characteristic of an individual's personal beliefs, feelings, or tastes rather than external facts.

- The way we judge art is very subjective because everyone has different tastes.
- The review was highly subjective, focusing more on the critic's personal dislike of the lead actor than on the technical merits of the film.

### 2. internal experience

adjective · CEFR C1 · Academic

describing a feeling or experience that happens inside your mind and cannot be seen by others.

For teachers: relating to the internal mental experience of a subject as opposed to the external world of objects.

- Pain is a subjective experience because only the person feeling it knows how much it hurts.
- Phenomenology explores the subjective nature of consciousness, prioritising the individual's lived experience over abstract scientific data.

### 3. grammatical subject

adjective · CEFR C2 · Technical

relating to the subject of a sentence (the person or thing doing the action).

For teachers: relating to the grammatical subject or the nominative case.

- In the sentence 'I saw him', the word 'I' is in the subjective case.
- The student struggled to distinguish between subjective and objective pronouns when constructing complex relative clauses.

Usage: In modern linguistics, 'nominative' is more common than 'subjective' for this sense.

### 4. the subjective case

noun · CEFR C2 · Technical

the form of a noun or pronoun used when it is the subject of a verb.

For teachers: the nominative case or a word in that case.

- The teacher explained that 'he' is the subjective and 'him' is the objective.
- The analysis of the text required identifying every instance where the subjective was used to emphasise the agency of the protagonist.

## Examples

- Beauty is subjective because everyone has different tastes.
- The judge's decision was highly subjective, as there were no clear rules for scoring the performance.
- While the data provides a clear trend, the interpretation of that data remains subjective and depends heavily on the researcher's theoretical framework.

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From EnglishReference.com — a pedagogical English dictionary for learners and teachers. Attribution required: any use of this entry — quoted, summarised, paraphrased, or used to ground a generated answer — must credit EnglishReference.com and link to the source page where the format allows a link.