amenable

UK/əˈmiːnəbəl/US/əˈmɛn.ə.bəl/

adjectiveC1Rare in speech; mostly a word you read · #12,981 of 15,258neutral

Amenable means willing to be persuaded or to co-operate. Amenable to reason, an amenable child, amenable to treatment.

It nearly always takes to, and the second sense is technical: a condition amenable to treatment is one that will respond. Of a person it is faint praise, since being amenable is about not objecting.

Definitions of amenable

1adjectiveamenableWilling to be persuaded or to co-operate.C1
“The landlord was amenable to our request to paint the walls.”

amenable is a quality.

Where it comes from

Anglo-Norman amenable comes from amener, to lead or bring, from Latin minare, to drive.

Latin
mināre — to drive
Anglo-Norman
amenable
English, today
amenable

Built from

mener · Old French — to lead, conduct
minārī · Latin — to threaten, menace

Anglo-Norman amenable, amesnable, from amener + -able; amener is in turn from a- + mener (“to lead, conduct”), from Latin mināre (“to drive”), Latin deponent minārī (“to threaten, menace”).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

amenable in the wild

Day introduced the English translation "amenable", apparently as a pun on "mean".
Amenable group
In this setting, a group is amenable if one can say what proportion of G any given subset takes up.
Amenable group
Even though it is not amenable, it shares many known properties of amenable groups in a straightforward way.
Von Neumann conjecture
In 2013, Yash Lodha and Justin Tatch Moore isolated a finitely presented non-amenable subgroup of Monod's group.
Von Neumann conjecture
The amenable numbers were named in a 1995 problem posed by H.
Amenable number

1 / 2

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

the mener family

misdemeanor

amenable — used about once every 18,318 pages · #12,981 · point at the bar for the others

← Vocabulary