insuperable

US/ɪnˈsup(ə)ɹəb(ə)l/

adjectiveC2Very rare — outside the 30,000 commonest English words, so you will meet it in writing rather than in speechneutralformal · an editor’s judgement

Insuperable means impossible to overcome, however hard you try. The obstacle wins.

It attaches to difficulties, obstacles and barriers, and an insuperable problem is one nobody is going to solve. The word is formal and it is often used in the negative, since saying that something is not insuperable is a way of admitting a difficulty while promising to get past it. Insurmountable is the commoner synonym and means exactly the same thing.

Definitions of insuperable

1adjectiveinsuperableImpossible to overcome.C2
“The cost proved an insuperable obstacle.”

Also accepted in games: insurmountable

Where it comes from

Latin
insuperabilis
English, today
insuperable

From Latin insuperabilis.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Man Called Ove

First appears in chapter 38 of A Man Called Ove.

Practise this word

insuperable in the wild

The direct attack on prime numbers using these methods soon reaches apparently insuperable obstacles, in the way of the accumulation of error terms.
Sieve theory
The revolutionary system proved to have insuperable technical difficulties and was abandoned.
South Devon Railway Company
More broadly, it is an analogy for supposedly insuperable extrapolated problems being rendered moot by the introduction of new technologies.
Great horse manure crisis of 1894

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.

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