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Allin

unintelligible

adjectiveattested in dialogue

  • //ˌʌnɪnˈtɛlɪd͡ʒɪbəl//

Not intelligible; unable to be understood.

adjective

  1. 1

    Not intelligible; unable to be understood.

    And indeed, my lord, there are so many passages in your writing in this controversy with me, which for their construction, as well as otherwise, are so unintelligible to me, that if I should be so unmannerly as to measure your understanding by mine, I should not know what to think of them.

    The curious feature of the art was that "horse-whisperers" actually talked to the animal, usually from mouth to ear, in an unintelligible tongue; which, however, the horses appeared to understand.

    Unintelligible announcements on station loudspeakers are both irritating and confusing.

    Lately, a study was made of oracle-bone inscriptions excavated in 1899 in the T'ang-yin county, 湯陰縣, of Honan Province and amounting to several thousand pieces, having unintelligible inscriptions whose dates nobody could determine.

Etymology

Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *né Proto-Indo-European *n̥- Proto-Germanic *un- Proto-West Germanic *un- Old English un- Middle English un- English un- English intelligible English unintelligible From un- + intelligible.

Forms

comparative
more unintelligible
superlative
most unintelligible
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).