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portable

adjectivenounattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈpɔː(ɹ)təbəl//
  • United Kingdom//ˈpɔː(ɹ)təbl̩//
  • United States//ˈpɔɹtəbəl//
  • United States//ˈpɔɹtəbl̩//
  • United States/[ˈpʰɔɹɾɪ̈bl̩]/

Able to be carried or easily moved.

adjective

  1. 1

    Able to be carried or easily moved.

  2. 2

    Able to be transferred from one organization to another.

    a portable pension plan

    Even though Houston’s moment was already fading by the late 2000s, the city’s hip-hop culture proved to be endlessly portable and disseminatable.

  3. 3

    Of software: able to be run on multiple hardware or operating systems.

    How do Java and C# create cross-platform, portable programs, and why can't C++ do the same?

  4. 4

    Of a program: able to be copied directly from one machine to another without the use of an installer.

    Starting with release 1.7, a portable version allows all Host Attachment Kit commands to be run without installing the Host Attachment Kit.

  5. 5

    obsoleteBearable, endurable.

    How light and portable my paine ſeemes now, / When that which makes me bend, makes the King bow.

    Christianity consists in a blessed exchange of yokes between Christ and a pious soul. He takes our uneasy yoke, and gives his easy yoke: the soul puts upon him that unsupportable yoke of transgressions, and takes from him the portable yoke of his commandments.

    It was also objected against John Chrystie in Spittell that he not being ane residenter within this burgh could not vote. To quhich it was answered that he is ane burges of the burgh and hes borne portable burding with the remanent burgesses these xxiiij yeares bygone.

    [N]one be choſen to be upon the Council but Magiſtrats and Craftſmen, actual and real Burgeſſes dwelling within the Town, and bearing all portable charges within the ſame; […]

Etymology

From Middle English portable, from Middle French portable and Latin portābilis. By surface analysis, port (“to carry”) + -able.

noun

  1. 1

    A portable building used for temporary purposes A trailer or other movable structure used for classes at a school.

  2. 2

    A hand-held video gaming device.

  3. 3

    Variant of portable toiletA portable building used for temporary purposes Clipping of portable toilet.

  4. 4

    Variant of portable computerClipping of portable computer.

    A few portables, particularly the small laphelds, go one step further and come with software built into the computer.

    Compaq portables have grown lighter and more powerful since then. Their newest luggable, the Compaq Portable III, is six times more powerful and 10 pounds lighter than the original model.

Forms

plural
portables
comparative
more portable
superlative
most portable
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).