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undetectable

adjectiveC1Very rare — outside the 30,000 commonest English words, so you will meet it in writing rather than in speechneutraltechnical · an editor’s judgement

Undetectable means nothing can find it. A leak too slow to move a gauge, a flaw no test picks up.

The word belongs to laboratories, security and medicine, where finding things is the whole business. A virus can fall to undetectable levels in the blood, which is the news a patient waits years for. A forgery can be undetectable to the naked eye and obvious under ultraviolet light — and that shape, undetectable to one thing but not another, is how the word usually earns its place. It is stronger than invisible: something invisible may still be heard, weighed or measured.

Definitions of undetectable

  1. 1adjectiveundetectableImpossible to notice, find or measure.C1

    “The change was undetectable to the human ear.”

    synonyms: imperceptible, untraceable

Where it comes from

From un- + detectable.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

undetectable in the wild

  • HAART also prevents the transmission of HIV between serodiscordant same-sex and opposite-sex partners so long as the HIV-positive partner maintains an undetectable viral load.

    Management of HIV/AIDS

  • An undetectable viral load does not imply a lack of infection.

    Viral load

  • One conjecture involves the mispronunciation of the Latin 'Dove est', meaning 'where is it?', because, apparently, the village was undetectable from a distance.

    Emmanouil Pappas (municipality)

  • Through this, Woolner concluded that even if catchers do have an effect on pitchers' abilities to prevent runs, it is undetectable and thus has no practical usage.

    Catcher's ERA

  • The mines used a case made of compressed wood pulp, cardboard, and tar along with glass plugs and components designed to be undetectable by Allied mine detectors.

    Topfmine

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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.