Definitions

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

  • noun The property of being impossible to read.
  • noun The property of being unfit for reading.

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From un-, read, and -ability; compare unreadable, readability.

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Examples

  • As a theme, in other words, unreadability is thoroughly readable, and is thus, paradoxically, a comforting distraction from the actual puzzles and discontinuities that reading, as a praxis, endlessly encounters.

    Introduction 2005

  • To purge registration rolls and discard ballots, partisan election officials used a wide range of pretexts, from "unreadability" to changes in a voter's signature.

    reminder: obama can't win if they don't count the votes 2008

  • To purge registration rolls and discard ballots, partisan election officials used a wide range of pretexts, from "unreadability" to changes in a voter's signature.

    Archive 2008-10-01 2008

  • In this way, the "unreadability" of the opening sentence

    Reading, Begging, Paul de Man 2005

  • "Reading, Begging, Paul de Man," as he addresses himself to the problem of what "unreadability" is.

    Introduction 2005

  • To purge registration rolls and discard ballots, partisan election officials used a wide range of pretexts, from 'unreadability' to changes in a voter's signature.

    Salem-News.com 2008

  • "unreadability" of her narrative, as it is manifested in Mathilda's alienation from the poetry she cites and the literary world it embodies as personified in

    Attached to Reading: Mary Shelley's Psychical Reality 2008

  • Given the proverbial "unreadability" of Joyce, he makes a good candidate for this treatment, since in the backs of their minds many readers must be thinking, "Pfft!

    For Blooms-Boxing-Day Richard Nokes 2005

  • Given the proverbial "unreadability" of Joyce, he makes a good candidate for this treatment, since in the backs of their minds many readers must be thinking, "Pfft!

    Archive 2005-06-01 Richard Nokes 2005

  • The Great Books were in fact icons of unreadability – 32,000 pages of tiny, double-column, eye-straining type … the translations of the great works were not particularly modern.

    2009 February 19 | NIGEL BEALE NOTA BENE BOOKS 2009

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