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honourable

adjectivenounattested in dialogue

UK standard spelling of honorable.

adjective

  1. 1

    UK standard spelling of honorable.

    It was aptly said by Newton that "whatever is not deduced from facts must be regarded as hypothesis," but hypothesis appears to us a title too honourable for the crude guessings to which we allude.

    The days of steam on the railways of Kent are now indeed numbered, and when stage two of the electrification is completed through Tonbridge to Ashford, Folkestone and Dover a long and honourable chapter in transport will be virtually closed.

Etymology

From Middle English honourable, from Old French honorable, honurable, from Latin honōrābilis, from honōrō (“to honour”); cognate with Italian onorabile, Spanish honorable. By surface analysis, honour + -able. In this sense, largely displaced Old English ārfæst.

noun

  1. 1

    UK standard spelling of honorable.

    So she invites her father and sister to a second day's dinner (if those sides, or ontrys, as she calls 'em, weren't served yesterday, I'm d—d), and to meet City folks and littery men, and keeps the Earls and the Ladies, and the Honourables to herself.

Forms

plural
honourables
comparative
more honourable
superlative
most honourable
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).