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incapable

adjectivenouncommon in dialogue

  • //ɪnˈkeɪpəbl̩//
  • //ɪŋˈkeɪpəbl̩//

Not capable (of doing something); unable.

adjective

  1. 1

    Not capable (of doing something); unable.

    A pint glass is incapable of holding more than a pint of liquid.

    I consider him incapable of dishonesty.

    The British people seem incapable of avoiding the habit of leaving litter wherever they go, and the railways certainly seem to receive their fair share of it, in carriages and on stations.

    According to the prevailing Danish rationale, Greenlanders were naïve and childlike, in need of protection and incapable of governing themselves.

  2. 2

    Not in a state to receive; not receptive; not susceptible; not able to admit.

    incapable of pain, or pleasure; incapable of stain or injury

Etymology

Borrowed from Middle French incapable, equivalent to in- + capable.

noun

  1. 1

    datedOne who is morally or mentally weak or inefficient; an imbecile; a simpleton.

Forms

plural
incapables
comparative
more incapable
superlative
most incapable
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).