These words apply to the active, exploratory mind and to its products, describing creators or creations that employ ordinary materials in extraordinary ways. Creative suggests the entire process whereby things that did not exist before are conceived, given form and brought to being. Original is more limited in scope and more specific, pointing to the creator not as maker but as source. The original mind, slipping free of the conventional and the commonplace, comes up with things no one else has thought of ?the new idea, the different approach: an original insight; a highly original poet. The creative mind goes further, combining the fruits of experience and imagination in an original way to recreate reality in a new form: the creative process; a mind in creative ferment.

Where creative and original describe the mind, creative and imaginative have to do with the imagination. Great literary works are produced by the creative imagination; but the creators of such works and the works themselves are called imaginative , not creative : imaginative writers; imaginative literature. Creative , when applied to people and what they do, makes an elementary distinction. The creative people in an advertising agency are the artists and writers, as distinguished from the bookkeepers and businessmen. Creative writing is the writing of fiction or poetry, as distinguished from the writing of fact or opinion. But the word creative is also used pretentiously in advertising lingo to mean novel, new or different: creative hair styling.

Imaginative and inventive are alike in indicating an active fancy, a nimble exercise of mind; and both words apply to works that are strikingly original. But where the imaginative person may visualize things very different from reality, the inventive person works out how to put things together in a new way so that they will function. Inventiveness is a practical kind of creativity. It calls into play analytical qualities of mind, often in the service of a common-sense idea of what is needed.

The resourceful mind solves it problems despite limitations, finding whatever means are available and adapting them to its ends. Where an inventive mind poses its own problems, a resourceful mind copes with externally imposed problems.

• The resourceful Scarlett O’Hara made a ball gown from her curtains.

An imaginative child may express himself by drawing. An inventive child may do wonders with a Meccano set. A resourceful child may drape an old sheet over a card table to make his own private cubby-house. Imposed limitations are not always implied. Faced with the same abundance of toys, one child still might become easily bored; a resourceful child, by contrast, might soon begin to develop new games, using untried combinations of these elements.

The ingenious person is both inventive and resourceful , but above all, he is brilliantly clever. Ingenious may, in fact, sometimes suggest superficial cleverness indulged in for its own sake, without a cause. But the word is more often complimentary, an expression of admiring surprise at the ability to solve a problem neatly in a highly original way. Applied to products themselves, ingenious may indicate something unusually complex or intricate: an ingenious water clock. It can also suggest something deliberately devised to trick or mislead: an ingenious way of coping with absentees; an ingenious method for cheating in exams.