Impracticable meaning

ĭm-prăk'tĭ-kə-bəl
Impossible to do or carry out.

Refloating the sunken ship intact proved impracticable because of its fragility.

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Unfit for passage.

Roads impracticable in winter.

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Unmanageable; intractable.
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Not capable of being carried out in practice.

An impracticable plan.

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Not capable of being used.

An impracticable road.

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Not capable of being managed or dealt with; intractable.

An impracticable person.

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Not practicable; impossible or difficult in practice.
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Of a passage or road: impassable.
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C. 1841, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks, published 1960, page 18.

H. is a person of extraordinary health & vigor, of unerring perception, & equal expression; and yet he is impracticable, and does not flow through his pen or (in any of our legitimate aqueducts) through his tongue.

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1867, James Parton, Famous Americans of Recent Times, page 83.

The strict constructionists had dwindled to a few impracticables, headed by John Randolph.

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1870, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Society and Solitude, page 187.

Then there are the gladiators, to whom it is always a battle ; 'tis no matter on which side, they fight for victory; then the heady men, the egotists, the monotones, the steriles, and the impracticables.

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Origin of impracticable

From im- +‎ practicable.

Sentence Examples

  • Natural ventilation is impracticable in flat deposits worked by drifts and without shafts.

  • But the truth was that the Boers thought they stood to gain by fighting, while the British, though not expecting war, and acting up till the last month or so on the assumption that serious military preparations were either unnecessary or sufficiently unlikely to be necessary to make them politically inexpedient, had with no less confidence committed themselves to a policy which was impracticable on peaceful terms.

  • For absurd and impracticable schemes in Italy and elsewhere he neglected Germany, and sought to involve its princes in wars undertaken solely for private aggrandizement or personal jealousy.

  • This assembly, however, soon showed itself impracticable and incapable, and on the 12th of December the speaker, followed by the more moderate members, marched to Whitehall and returned their powers to Cromwell, while the rest were expelled by the army.

  • This portion of the law, designed to reassure foreign Catholics, met with little opposition; but the second portion, regulating the relations between state and church in Italy, was sharply criticized by deputies who, like Sella, recognized the ideal of a free church in a free state to be an impracticable dream.

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Words near impracticable in the Dictionary