assailable
English edit
Etymology edit
Pronunciation edit
Adjective edit
assailable (comparative more assailable, superlative most assailable)
- Able to be assailed or attacked.
- Synonyms: exposed, vulnerable, pregnable, susceptible
- c. 1606 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Tragedie of Macbeth”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act III, scene ii]:
- There’s comfort yet; they [Banquo and Fleance] are assailable; / Then be thou jocund: ere the bat hath flown / His cloister’d flight […] there shall be done / A deed of dreadful note.
- 1791, Hannah Brand, Huniades, or, The siege of Belgrave, Act IV, Scene 3, in Plays and Poems, Norwich, 1798, p. 82,[1]
- Plant the ordnance ’gainst the postern, / North of the Eastern tower; for there I deem / The wall is most assailable.
- 1849, Edwin Percy Whipple, “South’s Sermons”, in Essays and Reviews, volume I, Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, published 1887, page 385:
- Indeed, he lived among a generation of sinners, whose consciences were not assailable by smooth circumlocutions, and whose vices required the scourge and the hot iron.
- 1851 November 14, Herman Melville, chapter 41, in Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers; London: Richard Bentley, →OCLC, page 203:
- All that most maddens and torments ; all that stirs up the lees of things ; all truth with malice in it ; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain ; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought ; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick.
- 1993 February 16, James Dao, quoting Michael V. McGill, “Politics Complicates Formulas for Aid to Schools”, in The New York Times[2], page B1:
- What is assailable is that in the process of achieving that goal [equality], you level everybody down.