incorrigible
/ɪnˈkɒrɪdʒɪb(ə)l
/adjective
(Of a person or their behaviour) not able to be changed or reformed: she’s an incorrigible flirt...
- I mean, you've celebrated your second-year anniversary, and you've got this little guy, who I hear is an incorrigible flirt.
- I bet she knows her husband is an incorrigible flirt who seems to have sex on the brain all the time.
- Babel leaves the reader often stunned by his intermittent inhumanity, his incorrigible sentimentality, his deep attachment to Jews, his breezy indifference to Jews, and his love and horror in the face of revolutionary upheaval.
Synonyms
inveterate, habitual, confirmed, hardened;
incurable, unreformable, irreformable, irredeemable, intractable, hopeless, beyond hope/redemption;
chronic, diehard, deep-dyed, dyed-in-the-wool, long-standing, addicted, hard-core;
impenitent, uncontrite, unrepentant, unapologetic, unashamed
informal impossible
noun
An incorrigible person: all repeat offenders, but none of them real hard-case incorrigibles...
- We would rather not lock up many criminals, who might best be guided gently into better ways, but if such guidance is rejected what alternative do we have for protecting the community from the incorrigible?
- The Kenny Anthony I know is someone who would see his family deprived of their just due so the incorrigible among us would have nothing to whet their appetites with suggestions of nepotism.
Derivatives
incorrigibility
/ noun ...- And since his subject in this early period of his career was the incorrigibility of human hopefulness, repetition, not progressive plotting, was crucial to his method.
- Girls' average age of entry was fifteen, and the overwhelming majority were incarcerated for incorrigibility, immorality, truancy, desertion, and petty theft.
- Would greater longevity for modern man result in the same incorrigibility?
incorrigibleness
incorrigibly
/ adverb [as submodifier]: the incorrigibly macho character of news-gathering operations...
- It won't change the minds of the incorrigibly and wilfully stupid, but I did find it amusing.
- It is an iron law of politics that a protest movement's vitality is directly related to the number of vaguely familiar, incorrigibly smug, poorly informed celebrities the cause can produce on its behalf.
- Her statement, however, is incorrigibly abstract and false in its application to the circumstances.
Origin
Middle English: from Old French, or from Latin incorrigibilis, from in- 'not' + corrigibilis (see corrigible).
correct from Middle English:
If you correct something you put it straight, for it comes from the Latin corrigere ‘make straight, amend’. Someone who is incorrigible (Middle English) cannot be straightened out or corrected.