Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- adjective Inexpressible or indescribable.
- adjective Impossible to pronounce.
from The Century Dictionary.
- Incapable of being uttered or expressed; ineffable; inexpressible; unspeakable: as, unutterable anguish; unutterable joy.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- adjective Not utterable; incapable of being spoken or voiced; inexpressible; ineffable; unspeakable.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- adjective Not
utterable ; incapable of being spoken or voiced;inexpressible ;ineffable ;unspeakable .
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- adjective very difficult to pronounce correctly
- adjective too sacred to be uttered
- adjective defying expression or description
Etymologies
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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Elohim, etc., and still less Yahweh, the ineffable name, i.e. a name unutterable to any human tongue; instead of these, they used metaphors or expressions having reference to the Divine attributes.
The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume 1: Aachen-Assize 1840-1916 1913
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Gone, – past – buried in unutterable scorn, – are the days in which I appealed, either to him, or from him.
A Letter to the Queen on Lord Chancellor Cransworth's Marriage and Divorce Bill 1855
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When is anyone in authority going to utter the unutterable, which is that our financial collapse ultimately goes back to the fact that every dollar in circulation derives from a loan made by a bank to a producer, consumer, or the government, and that all these loans have attached to them a rental charge known as interest which is paid to the bankers 'monopoly?
Obama Economic Program Increases America's Bondage to Wall Street Billionaires 2009
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The third name is the name unutterable which means the All. Talks with Brother V. strengthen, refresh, and support me in the path of virtue.
War and Peace 2003
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The third name is the name unutterable which means the All. Talks with Brother V. strengthen, refresh, and support me in the path of virtue.
War and Peace Leo Tolstoy 1869
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When is anyone in authority going to utter the unutterable, which is that our financial collapse ultimately goes back to the fact that every dollar in circulation derives from a loan made by a bank to a producer, consumer, or the government, and that all these loans have attached to them a rental charge known as interest which is paid to the bankers 'monopoly?
GlobalResearch.ca 2009
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"Unspeakable" in the dictionary means the same as "unutterable" -- but the former is always used to mean something base or vile, while the latter usually means some rapturous or divine thought or emotion.
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SBG: the word "unutterable" also occurs in heel's phenomenology of spirit, page 66: "what is called the unutterable is nothing else than the untrue, the irrational, what is merely meant [but is not actually expressed].
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In his attempt to register the extent of his "unutterable" bliss at buying his freedom, Equiano offers a list of comparable moments of joy:
The State of Things: Olaudah Equiano and the Volatile Politics of Heterocosmic Desire 2006
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In such a project the spiritual element of understanding, i.e., the grasp of the relations between the points on this mental map and the external world was relegated to the margin as simply "unutterable".
HERMENEUTICS OF CULTURES IN A GLOBAL AGE Tusar N Mohapatra 2005
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