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Allin

cannot

verbnountop 1 000 in film dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈkænɒt//
  • //ˈkænɑt//
  • /[ˈkʰænɑt]/

Can not; be unable to (whether due to physical inability, logical impossibility, etc.).

verb

  1. 1

    Can not; be unable to (whether due to physical inability, logical impossibility, etc.).

    I cannot open the window. It is stuck.

    The butler cannot be the murderer, he cannot have killed her, because he was in another city at the time.

  2. 2

    Be forbidden or not permitted to.

    The Pupil after his Pupillarity, had granted a Diſcharge to one of the Co-tutors, which did extinguiſh the whole Debt of that Co-tutor, and conſequently of all the reſt, they being all correi debendi, lyable by one individual Obligation, which cannot be Diſcharged as to one, and ſtand as to all the reſt.

    The US supreme court has ruled unanimously that natural human genes cannot be patented, a decision that scientists and civil rights campaigners said removed a major barrier to patient care and medical innovation.

    “If China seeks to disrupt the global order, then China cannot continue to be party to international organizations that seek to preserve that order,” Republican Representative Frank Lucas, the House bill’s sponsor, posted on X.

    You cannot enter the hall without a ticket.

Etymology

From Middle English can not, cannot, cannouȝt, etc. (compare Old English ne cann), equivalent to can + not.

noun

  1. 1

    Something that cannot be done.

    the cans and cannots

  2. 2

    A person who cannot do (something).

Forms

plural
cannots
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).