Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • adjective Difficult or impossible to coerce or control forcibly.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • In physical:
  • Incapable of reduction to tangible condition by pressure: applied to forms of energy, such as heat and electricity, when they were thought of as extremely subtile fluids.
  • Not to be coerced or compelled; incapable of being constrained or forced.
  • In physics, incapable of being reduced to a liquid form by any amount of pressure. Certain gases were formerly supposed to have this property. See gas.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • adjective Not to be coerced; incapable of being compelled or forced.
  • adjective (Physics) Not capable of being reduced to the form of a liquid by pressure; -- said of any gas above its critical temperature.
  • adjective (Physics) That can note be confined in, or excluded from, vessels, like ordinary fluids, gases, etc.; -- said of the imponderable fluids, heat, light, electricity, etc.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • adjective Not to be coerced; incapable of being compelled or forced.
  • adjective physics, of a gas Not capable of being reduced to liquid form by pressure.
  • adjective physics, archaic That cannot be confined in, or excluded from, vessels, like ordinary fluids, gases, etc.; said of heat, light, electricity, etc.

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

in- +‎ coercible

Support

Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word incoercible.

Examples

  • Pacific Ocean shall pour into the Atlantic; when man will become more precious than fine gold, and when his ambition will be to subdue the elements, not to subjugate his fellow-creatures, to make fire, water, earth and air obey his bidding, but to leave the poor ethereal mind as the sole thing in Nature free and incoercible.

    Priestley in America 1794-1804 Edgar Fahs Smith 1891

  • How, then, is it possible to affirm the reality of an invisible, impalpable, incoercible being, ever changing, ever vanishing, impenetrable to thought alone, to which it exhibits only its disguises?

    System of Economical Contradictions: or, the Philosophy of Misery 1888

  • Liberty of thought and action, and incoercible desire to be free from governmental, traditional, ultra-ecclesiastical, or Shint [= o] influence -- in a word, protestantism in its pure sense, is characteristic of the great sect founded by

    The Religions of Japan From the Dawn of History to the Era of Méiji William Elliot Griffis 1885

  • The incoercible shadows, with soft feet, with a burlesque mask, blow long flutes of ebony or silver.

    Venepoetics Guillermo Parra 2010

  • We are that incoercible force that wants to do what I have repeated so many times and I say it you again today, to do what Cervantes express in his Don Quixote: change the giants into windmills, and not the windmills into giants.

    Social Media Firehose 2009

Comments

Log in or sign up to get involved in the conversation. It's quick and easy.