ineffability

Examples

• All

• When teachers use likeness statements in rehearsal, ways of solving the problem of ineffability are provided.

  Academic text (1998)

• The very ineffability and amorphous nature of some works of art preclude exact definition; even when art objects are both discrete and concrete, the experiencing of them often is not.

  Academic text (1994)

• To emphasize the ineffability of God was an anti-Newtonian position.

  Academic text (2016)

• At the same time, we accept that this nonverbal art will always retain some degree of ineffability.

  Academic text (1999)

• A reason why likeness statements are useful is that they solve (or help to solve) what might be called the ineffability problem.

  Academic text (1998)

• Ineffability is a recognition that meaning is, quite often or perhaps even for the most part, overwhelmingly outside of specifically human capacities for expression in word use.

  Academic text (2017)

• It is common in writings on spirituality to find the trope of ineffability or inexpressibility.

  Academic text (2015)

• Similarly, we are not helped toward a verdict of oneness or sameness by being told the sacredness, transcendence, or ineffability of the realities in question.

  Academic text (2007)

• For instance, in the prologue, the author expresses his text's shortcomings by referring to the ineffability of understanding, seeing, or reaching the mountains: "The copy of his attempts to describe the landscape will lack much that is in the original, for such matters climb high to where pens cannot reach; they are perspectives of deep distances."

  Academic text (2012)

• "The whole is greater than the sum of its parts," Dr. Andre Stevens declaimed with sharp vertical movements of his hands punctuating every word. "There is an ineffability to some things, a spiritual content if you like, that laughs at the efforts of small-minded reductionists to dissect and explain them away.

  Fiction book (1999)

Synonyms

I

inexpressibility

vsineffability

8.9

A feeling or idea too hard to say in words

is about being impossible to express fully rather than only difficult

I

indescribability

vsineffability

9.8

Something you cannot say in words

is focused on being impossible to express completely rather than merely hard

I

indescribableness

vsineffability

9.9

A state that is impossible or very hard to describe in words

is about the impossibility of full description rather than partial difficulty

I

inexpressiveness

vsineffability

8.9

Hard to describe in words

is about being impossible to convey fully rather than only awkward to express

I

indefinability

vsineffability

9.9

A state where you cannot describe something exactly

is about being impossible to express completely rather than just hard to define

U

unspeakability

vsineffability

9.6

A feeling or event too terrible to describe in words

is about inability to express fully rather than emotional horror preventing speech

How Expressible

clarity

152 3.0

expressivity

8.1

ineffability

9.9

Surface Forms

Morphology

Etymology