impracticable

From im- +‎ practicable.

• (UK) IPA^(key): /ɪmˈpɹaktɪkəb(ə)l/

• Audio (Southern England):

  (file)

impracticable (comparative more impracticable, superlative most impracticable)

1. Not practicable; impossible or difficult in practice.

   Antonym: practicable

   • 1952 February, H. C. Casserley, “Permanent Wayfarings”, in Railway Magazine, page 77:

     It has not been used for many years, and although it was impracticable to photograph the engine in the small confines of the shed it was possible to obtain a picture of the plate which it still carries showing the former ownership.

   • 2003, Angela Y. Davis, chapter 1, in Are Prisons Obsolete?‎^[1], archived from the original on 19 May 2023, pages 9-10:

     Prison abolitionists are dismissed as utopians and idealists whose ideas are at best unrealistic and impracticable, and, at worst, mystifying and foolish. This is a measure of how difficult it is to envision a social order that does not rely on the threat of sequestering people in dreadful places designed to separate them from their communities and families.

2. impassable (of a passage or road)
3. (obsolete, of a person or thing) unmanageable
   • 1713, Nicholas Rowe, The Fair Penitent‎^[2], published 1797:

     And yet this tough impracticable heart / Is govern'd by a dainty-finger'd girl ; […]

   • c. 1841, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks‎^[3], published 1960, page 18:

     H. is a person of extraordinary health & vigor, of unerring perception, & equal expression; and yet he is impracticable, and does not flow through his pen or (in any of our legitimate aqueducts) through his tongue.

impracticable (plural impracticables)

1. (obsolete) an unmanageable person
   • 1829, Henry Barkley Henderson, The Bengalee, or Sketches of Society and Manners in the East‎^[4], page 13:

     They were not allowed, of course, to join us in the sitting room, partly that their practice might not be disturbed, but principally, that I was looked upon as an utter impracticable.

   • 1867, James Parton, Famous Americans of Recent Times‎^[5], page 83:

     The strict constructionists had dwindled to a few impracticables, headed by John Randolph.

   • 1870, Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Clubs”, in Society and Solitude. Twelve Chapters, Boston, Mass.: Fields, Osgood, & Co., →OCLC, page 208:

     Then there are the gladiators, to whom it is always a battle; 't is no matter on which side, they fight for victory; then the heady men, the egotists, the monotones, the steriles, and the impracticables.

From in- +‎ practicable.

• IPA^(key): /impɾaɡtiˈkable/ [ĩm.pɾaɣ̞.t̪iˈka.β̞le]
• Rhymes: -able
• Syllabification: im‧prac‧ti‧ca‧ble

impracticable m or f (masculine and feminine plural impracticables)

1. impracticable

• “impracticable”, in Diccionario de la lengua española [Dictionary of the Spanish Language] (in Spanish), online version 23.8, Royal Spanish Academy [Spanish: Real Academia Española], 10 December 2024