unreadableadj.

1655 T. Fuller Hist. Univ. Cambr. v. 82 in Church-hist. Brit. This modern way [sc. discharging many superfluous letters in spelling and accommodating the sounds of long and short vowels] will render ancient books in a short time unreadable to any, save Antiquaries.

1830 M. R. Mitford Our Village IV. 182 Oh such letters!..and in such a hand! so pretty and so unreadable!

1929 Pop. Mech. Dec. 939/1 This is the last moment the great ship ‘Titanic’ sank... The band are still playing, the officers are running here and there, although their tasks are hopeless; men are going mad, while..[unreadable].

1958 Educ. Theatre Jrnl. 10 187 In case signature is unreadable here is the name clear.

2006 C. Frazier Thirteen Moons i. iii. 22 Another whole journal from a few years later is all bucked and stained and nearly unreadable from being soaked during a river crossing.

1797 I. D'Israeli Vaurien I. i. 8 The Apothecary, who with tolerable facility composed much unreadable verse, and was then employed on a couple of Epics.

1837 H. Hallam Introd. Lit. Europe I. iv. 427 Making the entire work unreadable by the most patient..of mankind.

1867 Darwin in F. Darwin Life & Lett. (1887) III. 96 After the horrid, tedious, dull work of my present huge, and I fear unreadable, book.

1957 London Mag. Aug. 59 There has only been one edition of it in the past hundred years, compared to the dozen or so of Walpole's unreadable spine-chiller.

2009 N.Y. Rev. Bks. 30 Apr. 45/1 I like the weird-tales fiction of H. P. Lovecraft,..but recognize that many intelligent people find him unreadable.

1821 L. Hunt Indicator 17 Jan. 115 On opening the book, we are then struck with the delight it must afford to those who have no other language, and amused with the unreadable face it presents to those who are not acquainted with it.

1852 C. B. Mansfield Paraguay, Brazil, & Plate (1856) 66 Whether I go down by steamer to Monte Video..or whether I go into the interior of San Paulo..is at present written in the Unreadable Book.

1911 Pop. Mech. Nov. 761/2 A key card for use in correspondence on postals that makes the matter unreadable unless the recipient has a duplicate key card.

2006 C. Smith Pro Open Source Mail xiii. 213 For English-speaking readers, e-mail composed and sent in an Asian character set will be completely unreadable; their e-mail reader will not recognize or translate the characters properly.

1853 Anglo-Amer. Mag. Dec. 573/2 As for the Baron he preserved the same unreadable expression of countenance.

1940 W. Faulkner Hamlet ii. ii. 135 Varner..called a general greeting, short, perfectly inflectionless, unreadable.

1988 Newsday 22 Apr. iii. 13/4 His furrowed brow is static, his face is unreadable.

2011 I. S. Smith In Lonely Places 238 His inability to comprehend the unreadable heart of the man he has been following.

1952 Electronics Sept. 102/1 Below 30 millivolts the signal-to-noise ratio is generally so poor that the can is automatically rejected as unreadable.

1961 U.S. Patent 2,978,675 5 If the best and next best measures of signal-to-noise ratio of a particular character are too nearly the same, the character is rejected as unreadable.

1986 Brit. Med. Jrnl. 25 Jan. 223/1 A microscopic speck of grit may damage the surface of a disc and erase information or make it unreadable.

2011 Amer. Banker (Nexis) 18 Oct. Such devices could use point-to-point encryption to scramble the text of card data into an unreadable format.

1825 Edinb. Mag. Sept. 345/2 There has, indeed, been in by far the most of its papers a most clown-like aukwardness and unreadability.

1936 E. Pound Let. 25 Apr. (1971) 280 I spose I cd. be allowed to make an occasional confronto between Britches' dulness and the serious unreadability of a few blokes that would write if they could, but at any rate don't pretend.

2002 Prospect Dec. 44/2 The mystery is that Bloom, for all his nearly perfect unreadability, today finds himself in that small but lucky elite of writers whose books sell without being actually read.

1787 W. Thomson in tr. A. Cunningham Hist. Great Brit. I. Introd. p. xxxiii When we reflect on what Mr. Paton says, of the unreadableness of the notes on Vandewater's Horace..we shall be fully satisfied that it was the old hand in the specimen.

1856 R. A. Vaughan Hours with Mystics II. viii. vii. 74 Reason will not attempt to rescue him from condign sentence of unreadableness.

1913 Mod. Lang. Rev. 8 36 The Cantos are only redeemed from unreadableness by the fine similes, the lofty poetical touches.

1999 Art Jrnl. 58 90 The unreadableness of the languages is intended to evoke the limitations of human knowledge.