inconceivable
/ɪnkənˈsiːvəb(ə)l
/adjective
Not capable of being imagined or grasped mentally; unbelievable: [with clause]: it seemed inconceivable that the president had been unaware of what was going on they behaved with inconceivable cruelty...
- It is not at all inconceivable that a small number of them are capable of acting like idiots.
- Because the falsity of such a proposition is inconceivable, you cannot have a clear grasp of its meaning and be in doubt as to its truth.
- We find it inconceivable that his accounts were imagined or invented.
Synonyms
beyond belief, unbelievable, extremely difficult to believe, scarcely credible, incredible, unthinkable, unimaginable, unimagined, extremely unlikely, not in the least likely, extremely implausible, extremely doubtful;
impossible, beyond the bounds of possibility, out of the question, preposterous, ridiculous, ludicrous, absurd, incomprehensible
informal hard to swallow, mind-boggling
Derivatives
inconceivability
/ noun ...- It is a mixture of both indecision and the truly solid faith in the inconceivability of a heavenly body.
- Paradox lends itself to the expression of religious ideas, especially Christian notions concerned with the doctrine of the incarnation, with its mix of divine inconceivability and worldly embodiment.
- This scandalous inconceivability - dead men talking?
inconceivableness
- Our inability to do this would prove the inconceivableness of the hypothesis.
- This argumentation is fallacious, since it confounds incomprehensibility with inconceivableness, superiority to reason with contradiction.
inconceivably
/ adverb [as submodifier]: a crisis of inconceivably devastating proportions...
- Gissing is so relentlessly materalistic in his focus that the writer's life looks inconceivably horrible by the end of the book: his characters exercise their meager talents towards prostitution or invisibility.
- ‘Saw’ is a product of Twisted Pictures, and that is exactly what it is - an inconceivably warped, demented and disturbing film.
- At a gas station in southern Baghdad, an inconceivably long line of cars snakes down a road, around the corner, and up over a bridge all the way across the Tigris.