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compelling

verbadjectivenounattested in dialogue

  • //kəmˈpɛlɪŋ//

very interesting; able to capture and hold one's attention

verb

  1. 1

    Also a form of compelpresent participle and gerund of compel

Etymology

By surface analysis, compel + -ing.

adjective

  1. 1

    very interesting; able to capture and hold one's attention

    The novel was so compelling that I couldn't put it down.

    The dirty secret of the internet is that all this distraction and interruption is immensely profitable. Web companies like to boast about "creating compelling content", or offering services that let you "stay up to date with what your friends are doing", "share the things you love with the world" and so on.

  2. 2

    capable of causing someone to believe or agree

    He made a compelling argument.

    Terry's goal looked to have put Chelsea in control on the stroke of half-time but Arsenal's response presented a compelling case for Wenger's insistence that reports of his side's demise have been greatly exaggerated.

  3. 3

    strong and forceful; that causes one to feel like they must do something

    I would need a very compelling reason to leave my job.

noun

  1. 1

    An act of compulsion; an obliging somebody to do something.

Forms

plural
compellings
comparative
more compelling
superlative
most compelling
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).