intractability
1
9.6
- noun
- /ɪnˌtræktəˈbɪlɪti/
:
intractabilidad
- The Obama administration raised expectations about an economy they could not fix; instead of taming the political system, the bad economy exacerbated its intractability, giving Republicans a greater chance to oppose almost everything the President did.
Examples
-
Here, the intractability of sin crystallized a change in his attitudes.
Academic text (1990) -
Still, gaping racial disparities defy us by their intractability.
Academic text (1996) -
Eastern showed decades ago that intractability can, indeed, bring the company down.
Blog text (14) -
The tension between American independence and American intractability is ancient.
Blog text (6) -
Polls back that this is what Americans want, and yet they enter the negotiations with intractability.
Blog text (14) -
This shift toward the intractability of sin and the resulting need for grace was crucial for Augustine's later career.
Academic text (1990) -
The intractability of action and intervention does not imply or mean impossibility.
Academic text (2004) -
As the debate continued to unfold on the news, people outside the area simply shook their heads at its intractability and got on with their lives.
Fiction book (2001) -
Challenges to the recovery of this species include an incomplete understanding of the threats most responsible for its decline, insufficient information on the effectiveness of management actions, and the intractability of threats across a large geographical range and multiple jurisdictions.
Academic text (2012) -
The intractability of the negotiations made it impossible to reach a consensus.
Synonyms
1
8.6
A situation when something cannot be stopped or managed
1
8.9
A situation where people are very hard to control, like a crowd or class
The quality of being very difficult to manage or control
A situation or thing that people cannot control
Difficulty controlling something because it is complicated or awkward
Antonyms
How Difficult
Surface Forms
Morphology
intractability = intractable (semi-transparent) = in + tract + able + ity
The noun is a regular and easily understood quality/state formation from the adjective 'intractable'.
Etymology
Intractability comes from in- 'not' and tract 'to pull', the same root as tractor. So it literally means 'not pulled' and describes something you cannot move or control easily, which is why intractability means being hard to manage.