Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. Lack of ability or means.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. The state of being unable, physically, mentally, or morally; want of ability; lack of power, capacity, or means: as, inability to perform a task, or to pay one's debts.
- n. Specifically In theology, want of power to obey the law of God. Theologians have distinguished between natural inability, or a supposed total natural incapacity to obey the divine law without special divine grace, and moral inability, or a want of power due, not to incapacity, but to a perverted will. Synonyms Disability, Inability (see
disability ), weakness, incapacity, incompetence, impotence.
Wiktionary
- n. lack of the ability to do something; incapability
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. The quality or state of being unable; lack of ability; lack of sufficient power, strength, resources, or capacity.
WordNet 3.0
- n. lacking the power to perform
- n. lack of ability (especially mental ability) to do something
Examples
“I do want to point out that a spokesperson for Ralph Lauren told us today they let her go because of what they called her inability to meet obligations under her contract.”
“This inability is again demonstrated by your comment:”
“Again, the reason for this inability is the aesthetic form of art since any such synthesis would erase the struggle in which the individual is brought to an experience of freedom [10].”
“Remember that what you call your inability God calls your guilt; and that this inability is a wilful thing.”
“The book discusses what he calls the inability of elected officials in both political parties to enact the serious reforms the country needs to not only properly respond to the economic crisis but to address the nation's other long-term challenges.”
“He called the inability to put West Virginia into the GOP column “a marvel,” notwithstanding the fact that Clinton carried the state by 14 points four years earlier.”
“The suggestion that women are not advancing in science because of innate inability is being taken seriously by some high-profile academics.”
“‘Dissociative amnesia is characterized by an inability to recall important personal information, usually of a traumatic or stressful nature, that is too extensive to be explained by ordinary forgetfulness.’”
“What I think you can argue, though I don't think we're there yet, is that given what is happening now in the country and the possible long-term inability of the Americans and the British to control the country sufficient to allow the emergence of a representative government, that we were perhaps too optimistic in assuming the Americans and British could control it.”
“Indeed, to ignore this inability is to cross the limit demanded by art as the limit of its form, of its difference to an objective world that would subject it to the banality of mere existence.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘inability’.
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five syllables
ontogenesis, phylogenesis, concatenation, androgenesis, extra textual, inexorably, spagyrically, apophenia, iatrochemist, monocotyloid, morphological, parthenogenic and 941 more...
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my dictionary
able, abnormally, abroad, absent, abstract, acceptable, acceptance, access, accessible, accession, according to, account and 4551 more...
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