illegible
8
5.5
- adjective
- /ɪˈlɛdʒəbl/
:
ilegible
- We spent the entire evening trying to make sense of Kohl's nearly illegible handwriting.
- illegible writing
- illegible letters
Now the Braille on the outside is so faint it's almost illegible.
- Now the Braille on the outside is so faint it's almost illegible.
- So I wiped out the fancy private school education by taking the notes that were illegible and I didn't remember what was going on in class.
- Nearly the entirety of the book was copied by a single scribe who wrote an illegible Anglo Caroline minuscule and left generous space between each line.
- It was because the travel records of Bruce Sully that were Appendix One were illegible, and that's not true.
Examples
-
The thing disintegrates or melts like paper in a flood, becoming illegible as it falls over the embankment.
-
I had to buy her a new stone; the old one was illegible.
Fiction book (1992) -
Barney had more notes with him, this time in his own illegible handwriting.
Fiction book (1996) -
The warnings are illegible and unintelligible to a very large proportion of society.
-
The neon signs above the factories were half-dark, half-lit, delivering illegible messages.
Fiction book (1992) -
Some of what I've done, in fact, has been replacing illegible marble markers with hand-cut slate.
Blog text (1) -
The old manuscript was so faded that much of the text was illegible to everyone who tried to read it.
-
His handwriting is notoriously illegible, causing many documents to be misunderstood.
-
After the rain, the directions printed on the flyer became illegible and were hard to follow.
Synonyms
∞
8.6
Not clear enough to understand
328
5.3
Not easy to see, hear, or understand
14
4.1
Hard or impossible to read
8
8.8
Too hard to read or understand
1
9.1
Very hard to read or understand
1
7.1
Very hard to read so you can only understand a little
Hard to read because the writing is small, messy, or strange
Writing that is hard to read because it looks like picture signs
Antonyms
How Legible
Surface Forms
Morphology
Etymology
Illegible comes from the parts in- meaning 'not' and legere meaning 'to read'. So it means 'not readable' — the opposite of legible, which means 'able to be read'.