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impossibly

UK/ɪmˈpɒ.sɪb.li/US/ɪmˈpɒ.sɪb.li/
adverbB2+Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #11,315 of 15,258neutral

Impossibly means to a degree beyond what can actually be done or exist. Impossibly small, impossibly high standards, impossibly young.

It is an exaggeration by design, since what is described plainly does exist. Impossibly young is the standard thing said about anybody in a job you expected an older person to hold.

Definitions of impossibly

  1. 1adverbimpossiblyTo a degree beyond what can actually be done or exist, as of a task no one could complete or a waist too slender to be real.B2+

    “The cliff face was impossibly steep, so we turned back.”

impossibly is a degree.

Where it comes from

  1. Middle English

    impossible

  2. English

    impossible

  3. English, today

    impossibly

From impossible + -ly. impossible comes from Middle English impossible, equivalent to im- + possible.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

impossibly in the wild

  • Snare rush is a term often used in electro culture to refer to impossibly fast rolls.

    Snare rush

  • One of his plays was The Amphictyons, in which Telecleides presented a Golden Age of impossibly effortless plenty.

    Telecleides

  • However not many have been described due to the difficulty, and sometimes impossibly, of describing key characteristics such as wing ventilation, genitalia, etc.

    Chlidanotini

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

  • possible
  • possibly
  • impossible
  • possibility
  • impossibility