Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- adj. Too deep to be fathomed or measured.
- adj. Too obscure or complicated to be understood.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- Incapable of being embraced or encompassed with the arms.
- Having a depth so great that it cannot be fathomed; bottomless.
- Not to be penetrated by thought or comprehended.
Wiktionary
- adj. Very deep (especially of water deeper than a lead line can measure); bottomless
- adj. unfathomable or incomprehensible
GNU Webster's 1913
- adj. Incapable of being fathomed; immeasurable; that can not be sounded.
- adj. Incomprehensible.
Examples
“It is indeed a fathomless mystery of theology, and even if I were theologian enough to deal with it directly, it would not be relevant to do so here.”
“They liked to believe that King Minos of Crete, their mythical enemy from some even older past, had hidden a hellish monster that devoured the flower of Greek youth in the fathomless Labyrinth set below the palace of Knossos.”
The Guardian: From Hitler to Gaddafi: dictators and their bunkers
“Adrian Wilson couldn't quite bring himself to acknowledge the depths of fathomless futility.”
“He is ably assisted, of course, by the fathomless whiteness that surrounds his characters, and swallows up moral uncertainty like a seal eating a fish.”
The Wall Street Journal: 'Undefeated': Real School Football (Almost)
“The spirit of fathomless self-rebuke would spread to America during the Vietnam era, when defeat was almost welcomed as the penalty for America's many sins.”
“One of Márai's contemporaries, the great Hungarian poet Sándor Weöres, expressed the frightening sense of something dark and fathomless beneath our busy lives.”
The Wall Street Journal: A Hungarian Novelist's Literature of Fidelity
“It was the world, with a fathomless past and boundaries that were over the horizon.”
“Here too that the usual Bloomian oracular tone is established in fathomless aperçus: "Literature for me is not merely the best part of life; it is itself the form of life, which has no other form.”
The Guardian: The Anatomy of Influence by Harold Bloom – review
“Reading her books had offered him a peek inside her fathomless brain, so he knew she was clever enough to wrap him entirely about her finger if he allowed it.”
“And I am forever a dolphin in blue sleepless waves, swimming toward a distant fathomless light.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘fathomless’.
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GRE Barrons Wordlist
A complete Barron's Wordlist for GRE preparation. Your online flashcard replacement.
abase, abash, abate, abbreviate, abdicate, aberrant, aberration, abet, abeyance, abhor, abject, abjure and 4084 more...
bilby
My fingers annoy each other
And my eyebrows are two confronting foes.
I want to twist my body like a wire
In a very desolate cemetery,
And fall down a fathomless well
Full of monsters, mothers and bracelets.
- Mohamed Al-Maghout, 'Stars and Rains'. Sep 16, 2008
brtom "I am the mate and companion of people, all just as immortal and fathomless as myself," Whitman, Song of Myself, 7 Jan 3, 2008