1. A reference to the removal of something: The city trash department was charged with the ablative task of clearing the streets after the severe storm.
2. Tending to be removed or vaporized at very high temperatures: The ablative material on the rocket cone fell off.
3. In grammar, applied to one of the cases of the noun in Latin and some other Indo-European languages: The ablative case is the removal, separation, or taking away and indicates the direction away from, or time when.

Grammatical "cases" are changes in form that are made of nouns or pronouns to reflect how they are used in sentences. For example, the noun "men" is changed to "men's" and the noun "woman" is changed to "women's" to show possession. Nouns in English once had several case forms, but the only one used today is the possessive case.

Pronouns continue to change case forms to show their relations to the rest of the elements in a sentence. The three cases of pronouns are "nominative", "objective", and "possessive" cases.

A grammatical case used in some languages to indicate movement away from something, removal of, separation from, or source of: The ablative case corresponds roughly to the English prepositions "from", "away from", and "concerning".

Raymond's sister had to memorize lists of ablative cases when she was studying a foreign language at school.

All of the ablative cases which the author used made the story interesting but a bit convoluted.

Examples of Grammatical Cases

Nouns and pronouns can be subjects, objects, or possessives and many pronouns and a few nouns show these various uses:

• Nominative Cases: I, we, him, she, it, who
• Objective Cases: me, us, him, them, her, whom
• Possessives: our, my, mine, their, theirs, his, its

The nominative case shows that the noun or pronoun is being used as the subject of the verb: "The students learned about subjects in the English class and they usually know that verbs show what the subjects are doing."

The objective case indicates that the noun or pronoun is functioning as:

• Object of the verb: "Jessica's complimentary remarks about Mike's work made him feel good."
• Object of a preposition: "Everyone went home after the meeting except Phil.