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communicable
in a sentence

communicable as in:  a communicable disease

show 36 more with this conextual meaning
  • He reached across her-noticing that she nearly lost her balance trying to lean back, as if he had a communicable disease-and pushed the red Emergency button.   (source)
  • And second, that the absence of communicable disease meant the recent episodes of sporadic lizard bites implied no serious health hazards for Costa Rica.   (source)
  • Misery is a communicable disease.   (source)
    communicable = contagious (figuratively)
  • Whereas the truths of science are communicable, being demonstrable hypotheses rationally founded on observable facts, ritual, mythology, and metaphysics are but guides to the brink of a transcendent illumination, the final step to which must be taken by each in his own silent experience.†   (source)
  • So long as they subscribed to it completely, their happiness was his preoccupation, but at the first flicker of doubt as to its all-inclusiveness he evaporated before their eyes, leaving little communicable memory of what he had said or done.†   (source)
  • Once established before the grate, and consoling himself for the inadequacy of the dinner by the perfection of his cigar, Mr. Jackson became portentous and communicable.†   (source)
  • With a favor to ask we review our list of friends, do justice to their more amiable qualities, forgive their little offenses, and concerning each in turn, try to arrive at the conclusion that he will be eager to oblige us, our own eagerness to be obliged being as communicable as other warmth.†   (source)
  • So I went on for some days cutting and hewing timber, and also studs and rafters, all with my narrow axe, not having many communicable or scholar-like thoughts, singing to myself,— Men say they know many things; But lo!†   (source)
  • It was not his incommunicable soul or his love for others or his social duty or any of the fraudulent sounds by which he had maintained his self-esteem: it was the lust to destroy whatever was living, for the sake of whatever was not.†   (source)
    standard prefix: The prefix "in-" in incommunicable means not and reverses the meaning of communicable. This is the same pattern you see in words like invisible, incomplete, and insecure.
  • No matter what unintelligible causes he ascribes to his incommunicable feelings, whoever rejects reality rejects existence-and the feelings that move him from then on are hatred for all the values of man's life, and lust for all the evils that destroy it, A mystic relishes the spectacle of suffering, of poverty, subservience and terror; these give him a feeling of triumph, a proof of the defeat of rational reality.†   (source)
  • In her dark womb we did not know our mother's face; from the prison of her flesh have we come into the unspeakable and incommunicable prison of this earth.†   (source)
  • My wife, fresh from the beauty parlor, was unmarked by her three days of distress, and in the eyes of many seemed to outshine Julia, whose sadness had gone and been replaced by an incommunicable content and tranquility; incommunicable save to me; she and I, separated by the crowd, sat alone together close enwrapped, as we had lain in each other's arms the night before.†   (source)
  • And scarcely had she paused when again that terrible incommunicable pain swept through her, the pain that could not speak once to Uncle Pio and tell him of her love and just once offer her courage to Jaime in his sufferings.†   (source)
  • Conway glanced at him in appreciation, and at Mallinson with some hint of reproof; but then abruptly he had the feeling that they were all acting on a vast stage, of whose background only he himself was conscious; and such knowledge, so incommunicable, made him suddenly want to be alone.†   (source)
  • She had given a name to her widower-diplomat; she called him "Eustace," and from that moment he became a figure of fun to her, a little interior, incommunicable joke, so that when at last such a man did cross her path—though he was not a diplomat but a wistful major in the Life Guards—and fall in love with her and offer her just those gifts she had chosen, she sent him away moodier and more wistful than ever; for by that time she had met Rex Mottram.†   (source)
  • This doctrine of the incommunicability of the Truth which is beyond names and forms is basic to the great Oriental, as well as to the Platonic, traditions.†   (source)
    standard prefix: The prefix "in-" in incommunicability means not and reverses the meaning of communicability. This is the same pattern you see in words like invisible, incomplete, and insecure.
  • In his loneliness he would have yielded his spirit into bondage willingly if in exchange he might have had her love which so strangely he had forfeited, but he was unable to reveal to her the flowering ecstasies, the dark and incommunicable fantasies in which his life was bound.†   (source)
  • Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.†   (source)
  • Something, an incommunicable vastness of feeling, rose up into his eyes as a light and shone forth.†   (source)
  • The Sphinx is not so incommunicable.†   (source)
  • What Dr. Reefy's "truths" may be we never know; Anderson simply persuades us that to this lonely old man they are utterly precious and thereby incommunicable, forming a kind of blurred moral signature.†   (source)
  • The sentiment of the opening bars, their languor and supple movement, evoked the incommunicable emotion which had been the cause of all his day's unrest and of his impatient movement of a moment before.†   (source)
  • Ah, it was good to be young, to be radiant, to glow with the sense of slenderness, strength and elasticity, of well-poised lines and happy tints, to feel one's self lifted to a height apart by that incommunicable grace which is the bodily counterpart of genius!†   (source)
  • Those graces of an intimate sorrow, 'twas them that the phrase endeavoured to imitate, to create anew; and even their essence, for all that it consists in being incommunicable and in appearing trivial to everyone save him who has experience of them, the little phrase had captured, had rendered visible.†   (source)
  • There was something irritating to her in the mute interrogation of Gerty's sympathy: she felt the real difficulties of her situation to be incommunicable to any one whose theory of values was so different from her own, and the restrictions of Gerty's life, which had once had the charm of contrast, now reminded her too painfully of the limits to which her own existence was shrinking.†   (source)
  • It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and the effort of life.†   (source)
  • His throat worked spasmodically, but made no sound, while he struggled with all his body, convulsed with the effort to rid himself of the incommunicable something that strained for utterance.†   (source)
  • Let the incommunicable objects of nature and the metaphysical isolation of man teach us independence.†   (source)
  • Oh, thou foundling fire, thou hermit immemorial, thou too hast thy incommunicable riddle, thy unparticipated grief.†   (source)
  • He had been annoyed out of all reason by the knowledge that they lay below him through the sick idle days—a burden incommunicable.†   (source)
  • The incommunicable trees begin to persuade us to live with them, and quit our life of solemn trifles.†   (source)
  • Each silent worshipper seemed purposely sitting apart from the other, as if each silent grief were insular and incommunicable.†   (source)
  • And how nobly it raises our conceit of the mighty, misty monster, to behold him solemnly sailing through a calm tropical sea; his vast, mild head overhung by a canopy of vapour, engendered by his incommunicable contemplations, and that vapour—as you will sometimes see it—glorified by a rainbow, as if Heaven itself had put its seal upon his thoughts.†   (source)
  • The word gentleman, which, like the word Christian, must hereafter characterize the present and the few preceding centuries, by the importance attached to it, is a homage to personal and incommunicable properties.†   (source)
  • For these are incommunicable, and inseparable.†   (source)
  • Yet what thou canst attain, which best may serve
    To glorify the Maker, and infer
    Thee also happier, shall not be withheld
    Thy hearing; such commission from above
    I have received, to answer thy desire
    Of knowledge within bounds; beyond, abstain
    To ask; nor let thine own inventions hope
    Things not revealed, which the invisible King,
    Only Omniscient, hath suppressed in night;
    To none communicable in Earth or Heaven:
    Enough is left besides to search and know.†   (source)
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meaning too rare to warrant focus:

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  • It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and the effort of life.   (source)
    incommunicable = not capable of being communicated or spread
  • You take the trouble to construct a civilization … to … to build a society, based on the principles of … of principle …. you endeavor to make communicable sense out of natural order, morality out of the unnatural disorder of man's mind …. you make government and art, and …   (source)
    communicable = in a manner that can be communicated and passed down
  • She moved among her flowers with consummate natural fluidity, enjoying the incommunicable pleasures of growing things with the patience and concentration of a watchmaker.   (source)
    incommunicable = not capable of being communicated
  • But they made no sound, and what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever.   (source)
  • None of the English people knew of this, nor did the chauffeur; it was a racial secret communicable more by blood than speech.   (source)
    communicable = communicated or spread
  • He had really seen no communicable ground for suspecting any ususual feeling between Stephen and Maggie; his own reason told him so, and he wanted to go home at once that he might reflect coolly on these false images, till he had convinced himself of their nullity.   (source)
    communicable = capable of being communicated
  • We could almost be called incommunicable, except we remained lucid; we got over what we felt, sensed and understood.   (source)
    incommunicable = unable to communicate
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