impalpable
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 1.58 in modern English
18
Scrabble Score
10
Letters
4
Syllables
7
Unique Chars
Meaning
adj
Incapable of being touched or felt; incorporeal, intangible.
adj
Not able to be perceived, or able to be perceived only with difficulty; insubstantial, thin.
adj
Not easily grasped (mentally) or understood.
Example Sentences
- "But here thou canst not handle aught, neither make the folk ware of thee, not though thou shout thy throat hoarse. For thou and I walk here impalpable and invisible, as it were two dreams walking."
- "On the benches lay figures covered with yellow linen, on which a fine and impalpable dust had gathered in the course of ages, but nothing like to the extent that one would have anticipated, for in these deep-hewn caves there is no material to turn to dust."
- "What is happiness, anyhow? Is this one of its hours, or the like of it?—so impalpable—a mere breath, an evanescent tinge?"
- "And I heard—him—it—this voice—other voices—all of them were so little more than voices—and the memory of that time itself lingers around me, impalpable, like a dying vibration of one immense jabber, silly, atrocious, sordid, savage, or simply mean, without any kind of sense."
- "She had an extraordinary sensitiveness to the impalpable elements of happiness, and as she walked at Darrow’s side her imagination flew back and forth, spinning luminous webs of feeling between herself and the scene about her."
Etymology
Word Breakdown
- Root: impalpabilis
Inflected Forms
more impalpable (comparative)
most impalpable (superlative)