Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- adj. Impossible to know, especially being beyond the range of human experience or understanding: the unknowable mysteries of life.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- Incapable of being known; not capable of being ascertained or discovered; above or beyond knowledge.
- Unknown.
Wiktionary
- adj. Not knowable.
- n. Something that cannot be known.
WordNet 3.0
- adj. not knowable
Etymologies
- From un- + know + -able. (Wiktionary)
Examples
“The characters, including Cromwell, remain unknowable, their emotions closely guarded; this works well for court intrigues, less so for fiction.”
Wolf Hall: Summary and book reviews of Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel.
“I like how this method provides structure while allowing the story to shoot off in unknowable directions.”
Writer Unboxed » Blog Archive » The story, the plot and the police
“Most decidedly, this is not artificial life (though I hasten to add that there is nothing mystical or long-term unknowable about components of living cells and organisms, including the eventual ability to tweak them).”
“None of us could have known what it would be like (yes, Bub, unknowable is exactly the right word) – distracted by shiny things or not – and most of us understood that from the beginning.”
“I like the Buddhist view on this – that wasting the present for pondering teh unknowable is a waste of the present.”
Think Progress » VIDEO: Powell Says U.S. Went Into Iraq Without Enough Troops
“It is simply unknowable from the polls who has momentum, if anyone, and whether Kerry is ahead by a few points or behind by a few points --- because the race is close.”
“Otherwise this unknowable is not only compatible with knowledge but is the efficacity of knowledge, perhaps of all possible knowledge, assuming the world is like this (as opposed to the Blakean world).”
Chaosmic Orders: Nonclassical Physics, Allegory, and the Epistemology of Blake's Minute Particulars.
“If what Kant regarded as unknowable is no longer thought of as an object, then, the ability to think something that is non-objective but not nothing becomes the task of thinking freedom itself since any account of the non-objective is an account of its freedom from the objective.”
“Rumsfeld blithly said they were "unknowable" -- and the Congress, a pathetic West Wing of this White House, in effect said "ok.”
Mark Green: The Most Expensive Arrest and Execution Ever--Worth It?
“But there is always the unknowable -- what is in a player's heart, and what is in the heads of a team's front office -- and sometimes the unknowable is a complete surprise.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘unknowable’.
Tweets
Looking for tweets for unknowable.
bilby "I was infatuated with this simple declaration that, Yes, food comes from somewhere! It does not manifest itself, pre-sliced and wrapped in cellophane, in the fluorescence of a supermarket. This, I thought, is incredible! I felt so above the Americans, happily blind with their sterile processed foods of unknown and perhaps unknowable origins."
- Rachel Slajda, 'Eye Contact'. Feb 18, 2009