Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- adjective Too deep to be fathomed or measured.
- adjective Too obscure or complicated to be understood.
from The Century Dictionary.
- Incapable of being embraced or encompassed with the arms.
- Having a depth so great that it cannot be fathomed; bottomless.
- Not to be penetrated by thought or comprehended.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- adjective Incapable of being fathomed; immeasurable; that can not be sounded.
- adjective Incomprehensible.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- adjective Very
deep (especially of water deeper than a lead line can measure);bottomless - adjective by extension
unfathomable orincomprehensible
Etymologies
Sorry, no etymologies found.
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Examples
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Reading her books had offered him a peek inside her fathomless brain, so he knew she was clever enough to wrap him entirely about her finger if he allowed it.
How to Woo a Reluctant Lady Deborah Gonzales 2011
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And I am forever a dolphin in blue sleepless waves, swimming toward a distant fathomless light.
The Memory Palace Mira Bartók 2011
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The spirit of fathomless self-rebuke would spread to America during the Vietnam era, when defeat was almost welcomed as the penalty for America's many sins.
Parallel Lives Arthur Herman 2011
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Here too that the usual Bloomian oracular tone is established in fathomless aperçus: "Literature for me is not merely the best part of life; it is itself the form of life, which has no other form."
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One of Márai's contemporaries, the great Hungarian poet Sándor Weöres, expressed the frightening sense of something dark and fathomless beneath our busy lives.
A Hungarian Novelist's Literature of Fidelity Eric Ormsby 2011
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He is ably assisted, of course, by the fathomless whiteness that surrounds his characters, and swallows up moral uncertainty like a seal eating a fish.
'Undefeated': Real School Football (Almost) John Anderson 2012
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They liked to believe that King Minos of Crete, their mythical enemy from some even older past, had hidden a hellish monster that devoured the flower of Greek youth in the fathomless Labyrinth set below the palace of Knossos.
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It is indeed a fathomless mystery of theology, and even if I were theologian enough to deal with it directly, it would not be relevant to do so here.
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Adrian Wilson couldn't quite bring himself to acknowledge the depths of fathomless futility.
No mirage: Warner basking as Cards head to first Super Bowl 2009
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It was the world, with a fathomless past and boundaries that were over the horizon.
brtom commented on the word fathomless
"I am the mate and companion of people, all just as immortal and fathomless as myself," Whitman, Song of Myself, 7
January 4, 2008
bilby commented on the word fathomless
My fingers annoy each other
And my eyebrows are two confronting foes.
I want to twist my body like a wire
In a very desolate cemetery,
And fall down a fathomless well
Full of monsters, mothers and bracelets.
- Mohamed Al-Maghout, 'Stars and Rains'.
September 16, 2008