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intractable
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  • the intractable ferocity of his captive   (source)
    intractable = difficult to manage or control
  • for he held a tractable, well-broken horse as unworthy of a lad of spirit.   (source)
    tractable = easily managed
  • In 1932, the combination of these intractable forces would result in widespread hardship for the agricultural provinces of old Russia, and death by starvation for millions of peasants in Ukraine.†   (source)
  • The Savannah Morning News proved to be more tractable than the Oglethorpe Club.†   (source)
  • The girl is a maid of fourteen, sweet and beautiful and tractable, and Lord Renly and Ser Loras intend that Robert should bed her, wed her, and make a new queen.†   (source)
  • On the other hand, if his wife was now going to attack single-handedly America's most intractable social problem, he liked his chances a bit less.†   (source)
  • The more tractable.†   (source)
  • At the time of my advent here, we had many Cholera outbreaks, perforating Dysentries, intractable Diarrhoeas, and the whole deadly Typhoid family, which were plaguing the Asylum.†   (source)
  • For instance, because of her intractable seizures, I did a hemispherectomy on 21-year-old Christina Hutchins.†   (source)
  • The ideal disposition is one of a kindly, outgoing, tractable nature, eager to please and non-aggressive towards man or animal.†   (source)
  • What pih-ers should take from Paul wasn't a manual for their own lives but the proofs he'd created that seemingly intractable problems could be solved.†   (source)
  • She had volunteered—naively, as she would admit—to help these boys on the field and off, unaware of the scope and intractability of their difficulties: post-traumatic stress, poverty, parental neglect in some cases, grief, shattered confidence, and, in more than one instance, simple anger at having to live the way they did.†   (source)
  • This struck him as an intractable problem, for a variety of reasons.†   (source)
  • He would call when he completed the Theorem, which led him back to it and the seemingly intractable III Anomaly.†   (source)
  • Ambiades had gotten himself into an intractable difficulty whether he knew it or not.†   (source)
  • Has he always been so …. intractable?†   (source)
  • I fly to Zurich and Lisbon to exchange ideas and make proposals and it is the kind of desperate crisis, the intractability of waste, that doesn't really seem to be taking place except in the conference reports and the newspapers.†   (source)
  • One lesson of China is that we need not accept that discrimination is an intractable element of any society.†   (source)
  • Each one is an individual, and once you penetrate his mind and heart, you can often work wonders with an otherwise intractable beast.†   (source)
  • Perhaps, he thought, the explosives could clear up obstacles more intractable than a road covered with rocks.†   (source)
  • "Boys, it's time!" came Padre Esteban's voice, interrupting their intractable argument.†   (source)
  • The militia, instead of calling forth their utmost efforts to a brave and manly opposition, in order to repair our losses, are dismayed, intractable, and impatient to return.†   (source)
  • You mean that if you had had the opportunity to keep her in restraints for another year she might have become more tractable?†   (source)
  • Someone young, tractable.†   (source)
  • When she scratched the screen door, as in the old days, and stepped inside, the dishes piled in the sink looked as though they belonged there; the dust on the lamps sparkled; the hair brush lying on the "good" sofa in the living room did not have to be apologetically retrieved, and Nel's grimy intractable children looked like three wild things happily insouciant in the May shine.†   (source)
  • That you're intractable.†   (source)
  • —Tractable.†   (source)
  • It was well known what an intractable problem this was in the first years of fighting, particularly in Manchuria, when it might happen that two of every three men were stricken and rendered useless for battle.†   (source)
  • After the fences I took on Enrico, the problems of political systems do not seem intractable.†   (source)
  • She said that she was unteachable, intractable, hopelessly stupid.†   (source)
  • When the family found a young man in the next village to be her husband, she had stood tractably beside the best rooster, his proxy, and promised before they met that she would be his forever.†   (source)
  • The visitor's correct name, Thanthalteresco, proved too intractable, for general use, and he was soon christened "The Inspector".†   (source)
  • …this bright dower and the considerable effort I had put forth in exploiting it, I was still unable to find a girl who would go to the dark gods with me, seemed now—as I lay abed feverish, poring over Life and smarting with the image of Leslie Lapidus chattering at me in the dawn's defeated light—a morbid condition which, however painfully, I should regard as a stroke of dirty fate, as people accept any ghastly but finally bearable disability such as an intractable stammer or a harelip.†   (source)
  • HELEN'S hand waits, intractably waits.†   (source)
  • As I was sitting with you I had an idea of a possible solution to a problem that was beginning to appear quite intractable.†   (source)
  • She had always been tractable but now she became thoughtful too.†   (source)
  • Really, you remind me more and more of your father-just as intractable.†   (source)
  • Harsh and intractable, like the rocky New England countryside which colored his attitude toward the world at large, the Puritan gave meaning, consistency and character to the early days of the AmericanRepublic.†   (source)
  • He thought he had been patient, but patience had made him tired-He was so increasingly tired, so sick and even bored with the bitterness, intractability that divided everybody and everything.†   (source)
  • He has a sullen, rebellious spirit; a violent temper; and an untoward, intractable disposition.   (source)
  • intractable metal
  • an intractable disposition
  • The Stark girl is young, nubile, tractable, of the highest birth, and still a maid.†   (source)
  • Joff will be no more tractable for you than for me.†   (source)
  • The queen had only smiled and assured him that Eugenides had promised to be tractable.†   (source)
  • Tommen, whose nature is so sweet, and notably …. tractable.†   (source)
  • It's that unyielding, intractable attitude of yours.†   (source)
  • Lysa is more tractable than Catelyn, true … but also more fearful, and I understand she hates you.†   (source)
  • As long as Dora was paid, he'd said, she would be tractable enough, although politeness would be too much to expect; all of which has proven to be the case.†   (source)
  • Some claimed he acted from ambition, for Prince Aegon was more tractable than his willful older sister.†   (source)
  • To many he seemed prickly, intractable, and often he was, but as his friend Jonathan Sewall would write, Adams had "a heart formed for friendship, and susceptible to the finest feelings."†   (source)
  • She remembered that a pretty face is not the best indicator of a tractable wife and looked among the ugly girls, but not even an ugly girl would marry a man who was pockmarked, who worked in the dark with spirits and monsters.†   (source)
  • The gridlock in the parking lot was so intractable that, even though the races ended at 6:30 P.M., it would be well into Sunday morning before everyone got out of the track.†   (source)
  • It might seem ludicrous to address as large and intractable a problem as white-collar crime through the life of a bagel man.†   (source)
  • If she lived, she would be sold South; the overseer and the master would not keep an intractable, defiant slave, a slave who refused to help the overseer tie up a runaway, blocking the door like Harriet did.†   (source)
  • Since he could not have the intractable Adams standing in the way, the French Foreign Minister sent specific instructions to La Luzerne to do whatever necessary to have Adams removed.†   (source)
  • A nation that drew its audacity from the quintessentially American belief that success is open to anyone willing to work for it was disillusioned by seemingly intractable poverty.†   (source)
  • He held her glance; she saw the faint movement she had noted as typical of him: the movement of his proudly intractable mouth curving into the hint of a smile.†   (source)
  • It was a perfect autumn day that he would mark with a particularly lovely passage in his diary, revealing in a few lines the degree to which the hard-headed, intractable New Englander was, in the expression of the time, a man of "sensibility."†   (source)
  • Once he realizes that he is of no importance whatever in the vast scheme of the universe, that no possible significance can be attached to his activities, that it does not matter whether he lives or dies, he will become much more …. tractable.†   (source)
  • But there is a fascination and nobility in this picture of a man unbending, narrow and intractable, judging himself more severely than his most bitter enemies judged him, possessing an integrity unsurpassed among the major political figures of our history, and constantly driven onward by his conscience and his deeply felt obligation to be worthy of his parents, their example and their precepts.†   (source)
  • Then, almost wistfully, he noted that even as he was seeing the intractability of social conventions and the human tendency to take itself too seriously, Nina was becoming enthralled by the Assembly's energy and its sense of purpose.†   (source)
  • He had fallen madly and intractably in love with horse racing from the moment he saw his first race as a child, and knew where he wanted his money to go.†   (source)
  • Keating had acquired a sharp, intractable manner in the last few years.†   (source)
  • But wild, down-twisting, squint-eyed, unchangeably firm and wrong in thoughts, with the prickles coming black through his unmethodical after-shave talcum: the puss of an executioner's subject, provided we understand the prototype not as a murderer (he attacked with his fists and had a killer's swing but not the real intention) but as somebody intractable.†   (source)
  • Thomas rny Lord do not fight the intractable tide, Do not sail the irresistible wind; in the storm, Should we not wait for the sea to subside, in the, night Abide the coming of day, when the traveller may find his way, The sailor lay course by the sun?†   (source)
  • …the garden and then to plow as his strength (his resiliency rather, since he would never be other than light in the bone and almost delicate) increased—the boy with his light bones and womanish hands struggling with what anonymous avatar of intractable Mule, whatever tragic and barren clown was his bound fellow and complement beneath his first father's curse, getting the hang of it gradually and the two of them, linked by the savage steel-and-wood male symbol, ripping from the prone…†   (source)
  • Oh yes, I watched him, watched his old man's solitary fury fighting now not with the stubborn yet slowly tractable earth as it had done before, but now against the ponderable weight of the changed new time itself as though he were trying to dam a river with his bare hands and a shingle: and this for the same spurious delusion of reward which had failed (failed? betrayed. and would this time destroy) him once; I see the analogy myself now: the accelerating circle's fatal curving course…†   (source)
  • I need not have been so surprised as I was at his tractability.†   (source)
  • I know my Ellen—haughty, intractable; shall I say, just a shade unforgiving?†   (source)
  • Kells's bay was not tractable at the moment.†   (source)
  • While the men were milking the boys would take turns in riding the tractable mare round the field.†   (source)
  • She could hardly believe her senses—so good-natured and tractable had he invariably been.†   (source)
  • Mrs Durbeyfield was only too delighted at this tractability.†   (source)
  • Carrie seemed quite tractable, and he congratulated himself.†   (source)
  • Then Red dropped his long ears and seemed ready to be tractable.†   (source)
  • He appeared to be tractable, and probably was good-natured under pleasant conditions.†   (source)
  • 'Was he young or old, healthy or sickly, tractable or rebellious?†   (source)
  • Ishmael regarded his intractable mate with a smile of indulgent pity.†   (source)
  • The spirit which served her was growing intractable: she could neither lay nor control it.†   (source)
  • He has a sullen, rebellious spirit; a violent temper; and an untoward, intractable disposition.†   (source)
  • I doubt not we shall see him in the morning more tractable.†   (source)
  • You know he is always good-humoured and tractable.†   (source)
  • "With all my heart!" replied Danglars, pleased to find the other so tractable.†   (source)
  • Following the shot was an interval of silence; the horses became tractable; the men gathered closer to the fire, with the halters still held firmly.†   (source)
  • And while Herr Settembrini hid his face in both hands—revealing very shabby leather gloves—Naphta asked in a chill, statesmanlike voice how else intractable criminals should be handled if not with stocks and cudgels, which were very stylish furnishings for a prison in any case.†   (source)
  • …vividly reviewed, possessed in her memory, of their daily intimacy, of the visits that they paid to each other, of that unknown existence which was all the more inaccessible, all the more painful to me from being, conversely, so familiar, so tractable to this happy girl who let her message brush past me without my being able to penetrate its surface, who flung it on the air with a light-hearted cry: letting float in the atmosphere the delicious attar which that message had distilled,…†   (source)
  • And yet he feared the rising in him of a new spirit akin to that of the desert itself, intractable and free.†   (source)
  • Lake seemed to oppose him, and evidently it took vehemence and argument on Withers's part to make the Mormon tractable.†   (source)
  • And—nor so strange to report as it may appear to be—though a ploughman of the troubled waters, life-long contending with the intractable elements, there was nothing this honest soul at heart loved better than simple peace and quiet.†   (source)
  • She felt that he was praising her, too, and blushed; certainly she had done all she could with his intractable friends, and had made a special point of kotowing to the men.†   (source)
  • XI Next morning, which was Sunday, she resumed operations about ten o'clock; and the renewed work recalled the conversation which had accompanied it the night before, and put her back into the same intractable temper.†   (source)
  • He was gentlemanly, steady, tractable, with a thorough knowledge of his duties; and in time, when yet very young, he became chief mate of a fine ship, without ever having been tested by those events of the sea that show in the light of day the inner worth of a man, the edge of his temper, and the fibre of his stuff; that reveal the quality of his resistance and the secret truth of his pretences, not only to others but also to himself.†   (source)
  • "But she's tractable at bottom.†   (source)
  • It had an especially well cured wrapper and was named Oath of Rutli; somewhat stubbier than Maria, mouse gray in color with a bluish band, it was very tractable and mild by nature; it had a snow-white durable ash that still showed the veins of the wrapper.†   (source)
  • The "woman" was more tractable, and for a dime Jurgis secured two thick sandwiches and a piece of pie and two apples.†   (source)
  • Some of them are unmannered, rough, intractable, as well as ignorant; but others are docile, have a wish to learn, and evince a disposition that pleases me.†   (source)
  • About this time, a beautiful little foal, a son of the onager, was added to our stud, and as he promised to grow up strong and tractable, we soon saw how useful he would be.†   (source)
  • When this was at last done, and addressing Mr. George as "General," she gave him her arm, to the great entertainment of some idlers who were looking on, he was so discomposed and begged me so respectfully "not to desert him" that I could not make up my mind to do it, especially as Miss Flite was always tractable with me and as she too said, "Fitz Jarndyce, my dear, you will accompany us, of course."†   (source)
  • The force of public opinion is the most intractable of agents, because its exact limits cannot be defined; and it is not less dangerous to exceed than to remain below the boundary prescribed.†   (source)
  • He was, too, very learned, and rational enough on all points which did not relate to his treasure; but on that, indeed, he was intractable.†   (source)
  • The inhabitants of such countries are handsome, tractable, sensitive, graceful in speech and gesture.†   (source)
  • Let us see, those who have families must be tractable, and shake hands with us and take themselves off, and leave us here alone to attend to this affair.†   (source)
  • Well, I took him in hand, and in one fortnight I had him tamed down as submissive and tractable as heart could desire.†   (source)
  • Under him the water was lying in a deep pool, clear as a shadow; down a little way it tumbled with a roar over rocks; then there was another pool, and another cascade; and so on, out of view; and bridges and pools and resounding cascades said, plainly as inarticulate things can tell a story, the river was running by permission of a master, exactly as the master would have it, tractable as became a servant of the gods.†   (source)
  • As her appearance and spirits improved, Sir Thomas and Mrs. Norris thought with greater satisfaction of their benevolent plan; and it was pretty soon decided between them that, though far from clever, she showed a tractable disposition, and seemed likely to give them little trouble.†   (source)
  • "Marry, brother Brian," replied the Prior, "touching the one of them, it were hard for me to render a reason for a fool speaking according to his folly; and the other churl is of that savage, fierce, intractable race, some of whom, as I have often told you, are still to be found among the descendants of the conquered Saxons, and whose supreme pleasure it is to testify, by all means in their power, their aversion to their conquerors."†   (source)
  • When he looked about him for another and a less intractable damsel to immortalize in melody, memory produced one with the most obliging readiness.†   (source)
  • Aouda fastened her great eyes, "clear as the sacred lakes of the Himalaya," upon him; but the intractable Fogg, as reserved as ever, did not seem at all inclined to throw himself into this lake.†   (source)
  • I never heard any harm of her; and I dare say she is one of the most tractable creatures in the world.†   (source)
  • A secret and intestine warfare is going on there between powers, ever rivals and suspicious of one another: the master is ill-natured and weak, the servant ill-natured and intractable; the one constantly attempts to evade by unfair restrictions his obligation to protect and to remunerate—the other his obligation to obey.†   (source)
  • Tom Loker we left groaning and touzling in a most immaculately clean Quaker bed, under the motherly supervision of Aunt Dorcas, who found him to the full as tractable a patient as a sick bison.†   (source)
  • We may, perhaps, succeed in restoring her to them, if she is not obstinate: but I trace lines of force in her face which make me sceptical of her tractability.†   (source)
  • Of all the tractable, equal-tempered, attached, and faithful beings that ever lived, I believe he was the most so.†   (source)
  • "In all other respects, my dear mother, I'll be as tractable and obedient as you can wish; on this one alone, I stand out.†   (source)
  • …antipathies and sympathies, which fatally separates one nature from another nature, which does not hesitate, which feels no disquiet, which does not hold its peace, and which never belies itself, clear in its obscurity, infallible, imperious, intractable, stubborn to all counsels of the intelligence and to all the dissolvents of reason, and which, in whatever manner destinies are arranged, secretly warns the man-dog of the presence of the man-cat, and the man-fox of the presence of the…†   (source)
  • The famous republics of antiquity never gave examples of more unshaken courage, more haughty spirits, or more intractable love of independence than were hidden in former times among the wild forests of the New World.†   (source)
  • "I would soon have beat him into courtesy," observed Brian; "I am accustomed to deal with such spirits: Our Turkish captives are as fierce and intractable as Odin himself could have been; yet two months in my household, under the management of my master of the slaves, has made them humble, submissive, serviceable, and observant of your will.†   (source)
  • To women who please me only by their faces, I am the very devil when I find out they have neither souls nor hearts — when they open to me a perspective of flatness, triviality, and perhaps imbecility, coarseness, and ill-temper: but to the clear eye and eloquent tongue, to the soul made of fire, and the character that bends but does not break — at once supple and stable, tractable and consistent — I am ever tender and true.†   (source)
  • The deep and sharp rowels with which Ivanhoe's heels were now armed, began to make the worthy Prior repent of his courtesy, and ejaculate,—"Nay, but fair sir, now I bethink me, my Malkin abideth not the spur—Better it were that you tarry for the mare of our manciple down at the Grange, which may be had in little more than an hour, and cannot but be tractable, in respect that she draweth much of our winter fire-wood, and eateth no corn."†   (source)
  • "Come," he said to himself, "let me try if he will be more tractable than the other;" and he tapped gently at the door.†   (source)
  • Captain Fannicot, a bold and impatient bourgeois, a sort of condottiere of the order of those whom we have just characterized, a fanatical and intractable governmentalist, could not resist the temptation to fire prematurely, and the ambition of capturing the barricade alone and unaided, that is to say, with his company.†   (source)
  • In the tractability with which, at my wish, you forsook a study in which you were interested, and adopted another because it interested me; in the untiring assiduity with which you have since persevered in it — in the unflagging energy and unshaken temper with which you have met its difficulties — I acknowledge the complement of the qualities I seek.†   (source)
  • Intractable to mortal men they are, no one could train them except their master, whom a goddess bore.†   (source)
  • Antipathy in one nation against another disposes each more readily to offer insult and injury, to lay hold of slight causes of umbrage, and to be haughty and intractable, when accidental or trifling occasions of dispute occur.†   (source)
  • It would not be intractability and maybe you couldn't call it pride either, but maybe just the self reliance of mountains and solitude, since some of his blood at least (his mother was a mountain woman, a Scottish woman who, so he told Grandfather, never did quite learn to speak English) had been bred in mountains, but which, whatever it was, was that which forbade him to condescend to memorise dry sums and such but which did permit him to listen when the teacher read aloud.†   (source)
  • "O no," she said, intractably moving to the other side of the decayed fire.†   (source)
  • "Then it appears to me that Sergeant Troy does not concern us here," she said, intractably.†   (source)
  • Mihailov again tried to say that that was how he understood Pilate, but his lips quivered intractably, and he could not pronounce the words.†   (source)
  • thou shalt find me tractable to any honest reason   (source)
  • If thou dost find him tractable to us,
    Encourage him, and tell him all our reasons:   (source)
  • In order to render me more tractable, he brought me to this country house.   (source)
  • tractable obedience   (source)
  • For myself, I am so far from urging as a reproach to the principle of equality that it renders men untractable, that this very circumstance principally calls forth my approbation.†   (source)
    standard prefix: The prefix "un-" in untractable means not and reverses the meaning of tractable. This is the same pattern you see in words like unhappy, unknown, and unlucky.
  • …of their rulers or their princes—the nations, which are not in open revolution, restless at least, and excited—all of them animated by the same spirit of revolt: and on the other hand, at this very period of anarchy, and amongst these untractable nations, the incessant increase of the prerogative of the supreme government, becoming more centralized, more adventurous, more absolute, more extensive—the people perpetually falling under the control of the public administration—led…†   (source)
  • …done; what suffered; with what pain Voyaged th' unreal, vast, unbounded deep Of horrible confusion; over which By Sin and Death a broad way now is paved, To expedite your glorious march; but I Toiled out my uncouth passage, forced to ride The untractable abyss, plunged in the womb Of unoriginal Night and Chaos wild; That, jealous of their secrets, fiercely opposed My journey strange, with clamorous uproar Protesting Fate supreme; thence how I found The new created world, which fame in…†   (source)
  • But in the sciences of morals and politics, men are found far less tractable.†   (source)
  • "I understand you well," said my master: "it is now very plain, from all you have spoken, that whatever share of reason the Yahoos pretend to, the Houyhnhnms are your masters; I heartily wish our Yahoos would be so tractable."†   (source)
  • "Oh, now I have hit it," said Don Quixote; "thou wouldst say thou art so docile, tractable, and gentle that thou wilt take what I say to thee, and submit to what I teach thee."†   (source)
  • …unfortunate they might have been had they fallen into their hands, who would not only kill them as enemies, but also for food, as we do cattle; and indeed so much did this nauseate their stomachs, that it not only made them very sick, but more tractable to the common necessary business of the whole society, planting, sowing, and reaping, with the greatest signs of amity and friendship; so, that being now all good friends, we began to consider of circumstances in general; and the first…†   (source)
  • The observers of this Law, may be called SOCIABLE, (the Latines call them Commodi;) The contrary, Stubborn, Insociable, Froward, Intractable.†   (source)
  • …brutes, as industry is taught by the ant, and building by the swallow (for so I translate the word lyhannh, although it be a much larger fowl); that this invention might be practised upon the younger Yahoos here, which besides rendering them tractable and fitter for use, would in an age put an end to the whole species, without destroying life; that in the mean time the Houyhnhnms should be exhorted to cultivate the breed of asses, which, as they are in all respects more valuable…†   (source)
  • The duennas were now close to Sancho, and he, having become more tractable and reasonable, settling himself well in his chair presented his face and beard to the first, who delivered him a smack very stoutly laid on, and then made him a low curtsey.†   (source)
  • For he that should be modest, and tractable, and performe all he promises, in such time, and place, where no man els should do so, should but make himselfe a prey to others, and procure his own certain ruine, contrary to the ground of all Lawes of Nature, which tend to Natures preservation.†   (source)
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