representableadj.n.

1630 J. Sharpe Triall Protestant Priuate Spirit iv. 81 If externall, whether their apparitions be personal, in their own presence, or representable by Angells for them?

1662 J. Evelyn Sculptura v. 123 All the sorts of bodies representable by Graving.

a1676 M. Hale Primitive Originat. Mankind (1677) 311 The Perfections of God are not representable by any created Being in a true propriety of their nature.

1704 J. Norris Ess. Ideal World II. v. 285 God cannot therefore be known by..any similitude..because not representable by any image.

1756 J. Rowning Preliminary Disc. to Treat. on Fluxionary Method 2 Powers, and their Effects, being representable by geometrical figures.

1821 Examiner 760/1 The best, or at least, the most representable of the tragedies.

1891 19th Cent. Feb. 222 I have spoken of representable, not imitable, truths.

1949 Mind 58 321 We are now in a position to distinguish between four different types of statement representable by the form ‘f(x)’.

1993 New Scientist 5 June 50/3 He specifies tolerance constants (for example the smallest representable number ‘eta’) explicitly in the code.

2008 Straits Times (Singapore) (Nexis) 20 Nov. (Review section) It is not just that the structure of matter is representable only in abstract mathematical terms. In fact, physical reality itself is ineffably abstract and mysterious.

a1859 J. Austin Lect. Jurispr. (1863) II. xlvi. 469 In the language of German jurists, fungible things are styled ‘vertretbar’,—representable.

a1859 J. Austin Lect. Jurispr. (1879) II. xlvi. 807 A fungible or representable thing is a thing whose place, lieu, or room may be supplied by a thing of the same kind or even by a thing not of the same kind, as money in the form of damages.

1930 P. B. Whale Joint Stock Banking in Germany i. iv. 109 Bills of the first class possessed to a high degree the characteristics of standardized market staples. (Vertretbar is the adjective applied to them in German, i.e. ‘representable’ or ‘fungible’.)

2005 F. Werner Ambiguities in Decision-oriented Life Cycle Inventories x. 187 A commodity exchange is an organised, regular market event, where fungible, representable goods..are traded according to an agreed contractual routine.

1828 De Quincey in Blackwood's Mag. 24 894 Bringing so mysterious a thing as a spiritual nature or agency within the limits of the representable.

1847 S. T. Coleridge Biographia Literaria (new ed.) II. 624 It may be seen from his auto-biography..how from his earliest years a passion for the representable was nourished in him rather than a love of literature.

1920 Philos. Rev. 29 283 Logical knowledge..is not knowledge of the particular, the representable, but of the universal; it is not even knowledge of the form of particulars, but only of pure concepts.

1994 P. Falk Consuming Body (1997) vii. 194 The whole point lies in the way in which the boundaries for the representable are defined.

2003 J. Kneller tr. ‘Novalis’ Fichte Stud. iii. 120 Representation is composed of the representing subject and the representable, of the sensing subject and that which can be felt.

1817 S. T. Coleridge Coll. Lett. (1959) IV. 722 A regular Tragedy..which it was my purpose to write in the first instance wholly in reference to it's representability on a Metropolitan Theatre.

1879 W. James Coll. Ess. & Rev. (1920) 95 The craving for clear representability..leads often to an unwillingness to treat any abstractions whatever as if they were intelligible.

1977 M. Cohen Sensible Words i. 14 What these men share is a confidence in the visual representability of meaning.

2004 R. Barcan Nudity iv. 209 Nudity is..often a device of the edge—teasing, playing, shocking or simply pointing out the limits and boundaries of representability.