Unspeakable Meaning
/əˈnspikəbəl/Definition, CEFR level B2, pronunciation, examples, and quiz.
Listen pronunciation
Definition
adjIncapable of being spoken or uttered.
adjImpossible to speak about.
Sentence Examples
Fadil forced Dania to perform unspeakable acts on him.
Police encountered a scene of unspeakable carnage.
CEFR Practice Quiz
The ____ cruelty of the war was so severe that survivors refused to discuss it.
CEFR Practice Quiz (Alternate)
The survivors talked about the ____ horrors they had experienced during the long war.
Word Origin & History
From Middle English unspekable, equivalent to un- + speakable.
Literary Quotations & Historical Citations
"It is true that during the first week hardly a day passed that Erskine did not address himself to Watt, on the subject of Watt's duties. But in the first week Watt's words had not yet begun to fail him, or Watt's world to become unspeakable."
— 1953, Samuel Beckett, Watt, [Paris]: Olympia Press, →OCLC:
"The miser will remember his hoard of gold, the robber his ill-gotten wealth, the angry and revengeful and merciless murderers their deeds of blood and violence in which they revelled, the impure and adulterous the unspeakable and filthy pleasures in which they delighted."
— 1916 December 29, James Joyce, chapter III, in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, New York, N.Y.: B[enjamin] W. Huebsch, →OCLC, page 142:
"Yet to my horror I saw in its eaten-away and bone-revealing outlines a leering, abhorrent travesty on the human shape; and in its mouldy, disintegrating apparel an unspeakable quality that chilled me even more."
— 1926, H.P. Lovecraft, The Outsider:
"Anyone who goes into a voting booth on November the 8th and comes out saying, “I feel a hundred percent great about what I just did in there!,” is either lying to themselves, or did something unspeakable in that booth! And that means, as uncomfortable as this is, everyone has to own the floors of whoever you vote for, whether they are a lying handsy narcissistic sociopath, a hawkish Wall Street-friendly embodiment of everything that some people can’t stand about politics, an ill-tempered mountain molester with a radical dangerous tax plan that even he can’t defend, or a conspiracy-pandering political neophyte with no clear understanding of how government operates and who once recorded this folk rap about the virtues of bicycling."
— 2016 October 16, “Third Parties”, in Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, season 3, episode 26, John Oliver (actor), via HBO:
"unspeakable field names"
— 2008, Trey Nash, Accelerated C# 2008, page 509:
Explore More B2 Vocabulary Words
CEFR Practice Quiz
The ____ cruelty of the war was so severe that survivors refused to discuss it.
CEFR Practice Quiz (Alternate)
The survivors talked about the ____ horrors they had experienced during the long war.