impossibly
32
5.7
- adverb
- /ɪmˈpɑːsəblɪ/
- The task seemed impossibly difficult, leaving her feeling overwhelmed and uncertain.
- impossibly high
- impossibly difficult
- impossibly complex
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Watch on YouTubeSo a quick and impossibly deep question.
- So a quick and impossibly deep question.
- That we're able to work on impossibly hard things.
- And yet, I still want to be impossibly thin.
- The stars don't line up, and so people feel impossibly stuck.
- So you'd have to run, well, impossibly fast.
- I just wish people, people are just impossibly addicted to outside affirmation, to acceptance.
- And I love learning about people in their time and place who identify something impossibly hard to see and do.
- What a chart like this is actually showing us is that impossibly large creatures like Monkey and the Zil are probably impossibly slow too.
Examples
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That seems an impossibly long period of time for anything to remain alive, even frozen inside of an iceberg.
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There is an impossibly fine line between sanity and madness.
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And I think it's just impossibly deep, actually.
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That we're able to work on impossibly hard things.
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And I know it sounds impossibly hard to do basic things of life.
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I know that it is terrible in the dark and friends feel impossibly far away.
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To our impossibly difficult professor.
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Not long after sitting in, he saw that the details of the plot were impossibly similar to those of his own life.
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However, their mission to sink as much tonnage as possible was impossibly large for such a small fleet.
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I've been moving through Greenland trying to get to villages and settlements that are impossibly far away.
Synonyms
7
6.8
To a degree that is very hard to believe
2
7.7
In a way that is very hard to imagine
1
8.2
In a way that is so great it cannot be understood or believed
1
7.5
An amount so great you cannot imagine
1
7.5
In a way that is hard to believe
1
7.5
In a way that is impossible to reach or achieve
1
8.1
So hard to reach that few people can get to it
1
8.3
So far away that you cannot reach it
1
6.9
In a way that is not possible or very hard to do
1
8.4
In a way that cannot be reached
1
7.4
In a way that is too difficult or impossible to do
Antonyms
How Extreme
Surface Forms
Morphology
impossibly = impossible (transparent) = im + possible + ly
Formed by adding the adverbial suffix '-ly' to the adjective 'impossible'; the meaning 'in an impossible way' follows standard English derivation.
Etymology
Impossibly combines im- meaning 'not' and possible meaning 'able to happen', with -ly to make it an adverb. So it literally means 'in a way that is not possible', and people also use it to mean 'very' or 'extremely', as in 'She looked impossibly elegant'.