ungraspable
1
8.6
- adjective
- /ʌnˈɡræspəbl/
:
incomprensible
- His reasons for leaving were ungraspable, leaving everyone confused and searching for answers.
Examples
-
Therefore, spirit, although its meaning may be very subtle or ungraspable, seems to have a tremendous effect.
Academic text (1993) -
In a world dense with understanding, oppressive with explanation, insight, and love, the members of the silent sisterhood long to evade definition, to remain mysterious and ungraspable.
Fiction book (1994) -
The world became something other than myself, something limiting and ungraspable.
Fiction book (2001) -
As for the rest: the issue isn't esoteric or ungraspable by men.
Blog text (10) -
In the same instant, however, the clarity of detail dematerializes as the whole transforms before the eyes into an ungraspable illusion.
Academic text (2014) -
Image-making is seen as essentially hostile to the mystery of life and love, which must remain ungraspable, thus leading Frisch to invoke the Mosaic prohibition that would seem to question artistic representation itself.
Academic text (1993) -
In that blaze of blue, I tried to remember whether the boy in the lake had ever come back; and looking down at that ungraspable blue, which plunged away on both sides, I longed for the hardness under green grass, tree bark scraping my back, sidewalks, dark stones.
Fiction book (1997) -
From textuality to experience, and from experience to textuality, Borges's story-poem ends not with ontological understanding, but with an ungraspable circular hermeneutic excess of meaning that remains shadowy.
Academic text (2016) -
An age that seems fundamentally elegiac in its attitude toward an often ungraspable past produces a great deal of poetry that, as I have observed, centers on the backward glance, foregrounding its hopeless urge to stop time or to regain what time has swept away.
Academic text (2017) -
The concept of infinity is often ungraspable for many students in mathematics.
Synonyms
∞
8.6
Not clear enough to understand
46
8.8
Difficult or impossible to understand
23
8.6
Very hard to understand or measure how deep something is
19
7.0
Something people cannot understand or find a clear reason for
19
7.4
Something you cannot find out or understand
14
8.3
Very hard to understand
12
8.9
Hard to understand because it shows no clear meaning or feeling
8
8.8
Too hard to read or understand
1
9.1
Very hard to read or understand
1
8.2
Not possible to understand or explain
1
7.6
Hard to know what someone thinks or feels
1
9.6
Hard or impossible to understand
Hard to understand or explain
Very hard to understand
Not possible for people to know or understand
Not possible for people to know or understand
Too small, slow, or quiet for people to notice
Antonyms
How Understandable
∞
1.0
171
1.6
207
3.9
28
8.2
1
8.6
46
8.8
Surface Forms
Morphology
Etymology
Ungraspable is made of un- 'not', grasp 'hold', and -able 'can'. Because grasp also means 'understand', ungraspable can mean 'cannot be understood', which is why we use it for ideas or things that are hard to make sense of.