unintelligible

UK/ˌʌnɪnˈtɛlɪd͡ʒɪbəl/US/ˌʌnɪnˈtɛlɪd͡ʒɪbəl/

adjectiveB2+Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #10,700 of 15,258leans spoken

Unintelligible means impossible to understand. Unintelligible speech, an unintelligible accent, largely unintelligible.

It is about the receiver as much as the sender — what is unintelligible to one listener is clear to another, which is why the word is used carefully in transcripts, where unintelligible marks a gap in the recording. Note intelligible, and that the Latin means able to be understood.

Definitions of unintelligible

1adjectiveunintelligibleImpossible to understand.B2+
“The announcement at the station was so crackly that it was unintelligible.”

unintelligible is a quality of obscurity.

Where it comes from

From un- + intelligible.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Song of Ice and Fire

Practise this word

unintelligible in the wild

Western scholars group Akha, Hani and Honi into the Hani languages, treating all three as separate mutually unintelligible, but closely related, languages.
Akha language
Ao is a dialect cluster of Naga languages spoken by the Ao Naga in Nagaland of northeast India, whose three varieties are mutually unintelligible or nearly so.
Ao language
Although Musey and Masa are mutually unintelligible, many Musey speakers also speak Masa.
Musey language
Karani gradually became unintelligible to the readers of the latter.
Karani script

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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