unguessable
English edit
Etymology edit
Adjective edit
unguessable (comparative more unguessable, superlative most unguessable)
- Not capable of being guessed.
- 1828, Mary Russell Mitford, “The Fisherman in his Married State”, in Our Village[1], London: G.B. Whittaker, page 278:
- Never was even washerwoman more untidy. A cap all rags, from which the hair came straggling in elf-locks over a face which generally looked red-hot, surmounted by an old bonnet, originally black, now rusty, and so twisted into crooks and bends that its pristine shape was unguessable […]
- 1898, Henry James, The Turn of the Screw, in The Two Magics, London: Heinemann, Chapter 13, p. 101,[2]
- What it was most impossible to get rid of was the cruel idea that, whatever I had seen, Miles and Flora saw more—things terrible and unguessable and that sprang from dreadful passages of intercourse in the past.
- 1965, Muriel Spark, The Mandelbaum Gate, London: Macmillan, Part One, Chapter 1:
- A woman of unguessable age, wearing lots of black clothes, snatched the child away […]
- 2001, Simson Garfinkel, Gene Spafford, Web Security, Privacy and Commerce:
- Especially bad are "magic words" from computer games, such as xyzzy. These magic words look secret and unguessable, but in fact they are widely known.