Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- adjective Impossible to know, especially being beyond the range of human experience or understanding.
from The Century Dictionary.
- Incapable of being known; not capable of being ascertained or discovered; above or beyond knowledge.
- Unknown.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- adjective Not
knowable . - noun Something that cannot be known.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- adjective not knowable
Etymologies
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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I like how this method provides structure while allowing the story to shoot off in unknowable directions.
Writer Unboxed » Blog Archive » The story, the plot and the police 2009
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The characters, including Cromwell, remain unknowable, their emotions closely guarded; this works well for court intrigues, less so for fiction.
Wolf Hall: Summary and book reviews of Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. 2009
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Most decidedly, this is not artificial life (though I hasten to add that there is nothing mystical or long-term unknowable about components of living cells and organisms, including the eventual ability to tweak them).
Athena Andreadis, Ph.D.: Venter's Celebrity Bacterium: The Faucet Drip That Would Be a Monsoon 2010
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None of us could have known what it would be like (yes, Bub, unknowable is exactly the right word) – distracted by shiny things or not – and most of us understood that from the beginning.
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I like the Buddhist view on this – that wasting the present for pondering teh unknowable is a waste of the present.
Think Progress » VIDEO: Powell Says U.S. Went Into Iraq Without Enough Troops 2006
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It is simply unknowable from the polls who has momentum, if anyone, and whether Kerry is ahead by a few points or behind by a few points --- because the race is close.
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It is simply unknowable from the polls who has momentum, if anyone, and whether Kerry is ahead by a few points or behind by a few points --- because the race is close.
Archive 2004-09-01 2004
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It is simply unknowable from the polls who has momentum, if anyone, and whether Kerry is ahead by a few points or behind by a few points --- because the race is close.
Panic is passe... 2004
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It is simply unknowable from the polls who has momentum, if anyone, and whether Kerry is ahead by a few points or behind by a few points --- because the race is close.
Quote of the Day 2004
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Otherwise this unknowable is not only compatible with knowledge but is the efficacity of knowledge, perhaps of all possible knowledge, assuming the world is like this (as opposed to the Blakean world).
Chaosmic Orders: Nonclassical Physics, Allegory, and the Epistemology of Blake's Minute Particulars. 2001
bilby commented on the word unknowable
"I was infatuated with this simple declaration that, Yes, food comes from somewhere! It does not manifest itself, pre-sliced and wrapped in cellophane, in the fluorescence of a supermarket. This, I thought, is incredible! I felt so above the Americans, happily blind with their sterile processed foods of unknown and perhaps unknowable origins."
- Rachel Slajda, 'Eye Contact'.
February 18, 2009