ineffable
/ˌɪnˈɛf.ə.bəl/
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 2.41 in modern English
17
Scrabble Score
9
Letters
4
Syllables
7
Unique Chars
Meaning
adj
Beyond expression in words; unspeakable.
noun
Something that is beyond utterance; something unspeakable.
Example Sentences
- "Devotion bids aspire to nobler things, to boundless love, and joys ineffable: and such her expectation from kind Heav'n."
- "Stroeve was trying to express a feeling which he had never known before, and he did not know how to put it into common terms. He was like the mystic seeking to describe the ineffable."
- "They, and many others, are one with the trains that ran them, part of that ineffable atmosphere of Scotland's railways."
- "God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of his own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players, to being involved in an obscure and complex version of poker in a pitch dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a dealer who won't tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time."
- "As Alan Watts (1961) wrote, it involves trying to speak the unspeakable, scrute the inscrutable and eff the ineffable."
Etymology
Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *né Proto-Indo-European *n̥- Proto-Italic *n̥- Latin in- Proto-Indo-European *h₁éǵʰ Proto-Indo-European *-s Proto-Indo-European *h₁éǵʰs Proto-Italic *eks Latin ex Latin ex- Proto-Indo-European *bʰeh₂- Proto-Indo-European *-ti Proto-Indo-European *bʰéh₂ti Proto-Italic *fāōr Latin for Latin effor Proto-Indo-European *-dʰlom Proto-Italic *-ðlom Proto-Italic *-ðlis Latin -bilis Latin effābilis Latin ineffābilislbor. Middle French ineffablebor. English ineffable Borrowed from Middle French ineffable, a learned borrowing from Latin ineffābilis, from in- (“not”) + effābilis (“utterable”).
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /ˌɪnˈɛf.ə.bəl/
- British English: /ɪˈnɛf.ə.bəl/