Word Finder - unintelligible

definition

Not intelligible; unable to be understood.

He grumbled something unintelligible and hung up.

The languages of the different tribes are mutually unintelligible.

Some time after the capture of Jerusalem the ark was brought from Baal-Judah, but at the threshing-floor of Nacon (an unintelligible name) Abinadab's son Uzzah laid hands upon it and was struck down for his impiety.

A cryptographic machine, which changed the cipher automatically and printed a message, entirely unintelligible until translated by a duplicate instrument, was one of the most perfect examples of this.

Even where, as in the Vedas, the sacred books of India, there is proof that the work has been transmitted without change through many centuries, the existence of unintelligible passages and unmetrical verses shows that here too there is work for textual criticism to perform, though in the opinion of most scholars it should be confined to the restoration of such forms as would be unconsciously and inevitably corrupted through changes of pronunciation and the like.

The Nicobarese may be best described as a Far Eastern race, having generally the characteristics of the less civilized tribes of the Malay Peninsula and the south-eastern portion of the Asiatic continent, and speaking varieties of the Mon-Annam group of languages, though the several dialects that prevail are mutually unintelligible.

The treaty with the Latins is mentioned by Dionysius of Halicarnassus alone, who had not seen it himself; indeed, it is doubtful whether it was then in existence, and in any case, considering the changes which the language had undergone, it would have been unintelligible.

In London the Saxon stood outside the government for centuries, and the acceptance of the Roman survival explains much that is otherwise unintelligible.

At times details in the transmitted material are unintelligible to our author, and these in some cases he omits referring to in his interpretation.

The last is probably the most important of all Fichte's works; apart from it, his theoretical philosophy is unintelligible.

It is equally true that a subject apart from an object is unintelligible.

To the mass these signs are unintelligible, because they deem it impossible that Yahweh should utterly cast off His chosen nation; but to those who know His absolute righteousness, and confront it with the people's sin, the impending approach of the Assyrian can have only one meaning and can point to only one issue, viz.

It is evident that any Old English versions which might have survived the ravages of time would now be unintelligible, it was equally natural that as soon as French came to be looked upon as an alien tongue, the French versions hitherto in use would fail to fulfil their purpose, and that attempts should again be made to render the Bible into the only language intelligible to the greater part of the nation - into English.

There is a mention of Marcion in the same context, but it is unintelligible.

He makes use of germanized foreign terms which are unintelligible to the ordinary man.

In the course of time, however, it underwent many changes, and the earliest inscriptions must have been unintelligible for over a thousand years until they were deciphered by scholars within the last half century.

As a man of education and refinement, fond of music, the fine arts, and polite literature, he was unintelligible to the szlachta, who regarded all artists and poets as either mechanics or adventurers.

Much of it was obscure from the beginning, other sections were unintelligible apart from a knowledge of the circumstances of their origin.

If, then, this afternoon meal did not include it, Pliny's remark that their food was ordinary and innocent is unintelligible.

After the battle of Ambabah, at which the forces of both Murd Bey and IbrhIm Bey were dispersed, the populace readily plundered the houses of the beys, and a deputation was sent from al-Azhar to Bonaparte to ascertain his intentions; these proved to be a repetition of the terms of his proclamation, and, though the combination of loyalty to the French with loyalty to the sultan was unintelligible, a good understanding was at first established between the invaders and the Egyptians.

The royal road followed a route so difficult and circuitous that it is quite unintelligible as the direct path from any centre in Persia, Assyria or Syria to the west of Asia Minor.

Zacchaeus the publican and the grateful Samaritan leper further illustrate this characteristic. Writing as he does for Gentile believers he omits many details which from their strongly Jewish cast might be unintelligible or uninteresting.

In general the pentateuchal legislation as a whole presupposes an undeveloped state of society, and would have been inadequate if not partly obsolete or unintelligible during the monarchies.5 But more elaborate legal usages had long been known outside Palestine, and, to judge from the Talmud and the Syrian lawcode (c. 5th century A.D.), long prevailed.

Kepler, who examined Porta's account of his concave and convex lenses by desire of his patron the emperor Rudolph, declared that it was perfectly unintelligible.

To a reader not acquainted with the peculiar nature of the man, which led him to regard what commended itself to him as therefore objectively true, they must be, moreover, entirely unintelligible and, from their peculiar, pietistic tone and scriptural jargon, probably offensive.

The rock inscriptions in the wild district of Safah near Damascus which have been collected by Halevy are also written in an Arabic dialect, but, owing chiefly to their careless execution, they are to a large extent unintelligible.

Toland, writing at first professedly without hostility to any of the received elements of the Christian faith, insisted that Christianity was not mysterious, and that the value of religion could not lie in any unintelligible or self-contradictory elements; though we cannot know the real essence of God or of any of his creatures, yet our beliefs about God must be thoroughly consistent with reason.

Nevertheless, it is now acknowledged that at some far remoter time, before these nations were divided from the parent stock, and distributed over Asia and Europe, a single barbaric people stood as physical and political representative of the nascent Aryan race, speaking a now extinct Aryan language, from which, by a series of modifications not to be estimated as possible within many thousands of years, there arose languages which have been mutually unintelligible since the dawn of history, and between which it was only possible for an age of advanced philology to trace the fundamental relationship.

Some of the utterly unintelligible passages in this fragment are literally reproduced in the Ethiopic. The same wrong order of the text in vii.-viii.

It is impossible that there should be liberty, for if so the mechanical order of phenomena, by means of which they are comprehensible, would be disturbed, and we should have an unintelligible world, coupled with the requirement that it shall be understood.

To this extraordinary harangue, which from its own nature and the faults of the interpreter must have been completely unintelligible, the Inca at first returned a very temperate answer.

The ultimate source of God's actions is something either unintelligible or unrevealed.

It is broken up into very distinct and even mutually unintelligible dialects, the origin of several of which is, however, easily found in the political and social dismemberment of the people.

His first nominee, Dr Richard Turner, resolutely declined the honour, declaring that he would be unintelligible to the people; and Cranmer could only answer that English was spoken in Ireland, though he did indeed doubt whether it was spoken in the diocese of Armagh.

Up to this time the queen, Isabel of Bavaria, had been held in a kind of dependency upon Philip of Burgundy, who had brought about her marriage; but less eager for influence than for money, since political questions were unintelligible to her and her situation was a precarious one, she suddenly became favorable to the duke of Orleans.

Therefore, sometimes what he said was unintelligible or so quiet we had difficulty even hearing.

Plato seemed puerile, whimsical, full of unintelligible jargon.

However, plugging Jonah into the mic socket produced a fuzzy unintelligible gabble as if he was speaking from the belly of the whale.

I do not get why doing this renders the truth unintelligible.

Apps can do whatever output mangling they choose, including removing almost all whitespace to make the document completely unintelligible.

There are 24 languages each spoken by one million speakers; many are mutually unintelligible.

In my opinion they should be funny, scandalous, or totally unintelligible, in that order.

There is real wonder here in discovering the almost unintelligible past, to match the wonder inherent in trying to discover the future.

This is particularly critical for audio, where this can result in speech becoming broken or completely unintelligible.

Second, it is largely unintelligible to the wider community.

He'd injured his face in a climbing accident and was quite unintelligible, but no-one liked to ask him to stop lecturing.

We try many other beers here and my tasting notes become sadly unintelligible.

Even if the song seems totally unintelligible for you.

But even if I take a stick and trouble the glaze with my name ripples remain unintelligible.

So the careful placement of columns of figures in the normal print version can be rendered unintelligible in Braille.