in·e·luc·ta·ble

(ĭn′ĭ-lŭk′tə-bəl)

adj.

Not to be avoided or escaped; inevitable: "Those war plans rested on a belief in the ineluctable superiority of the offense over the defense" (Jack Beatty).

[Latin inēluctābilis : in-, not; see in-¹ + ēluctābilis, penetrable (from ēluctārī, to struggle out of : ex-, ex- + luctārī, to struggle).]

in′e·luc′ta·bil′i·ty n.

in′e·luc′ta·bly adv.

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

ThesaurusAntonymsRelated WordsSynonymsLegend:

Noun

ineluctability - the quality of being impossible to avoid or evade

unavoidability

sure thing, certainty, foregone conclusion - something that is certain; "his victory is a certainty"

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References in periodicals archive

It is our deep aversion to time and its ineluctability; our antipathy to its inexorable and elusive progress towards change, impermanence and death.

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The infuriating inevitability that the punished Corinthian King's boulder would roll down the hill every time he tried to roll it up is an apt analogy for the ineluctability that the characters of Mirror cannot change the past.

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While acknowledging the ineluctability of periodization, Jameson also criticizes such gestures and, along the way, undercuts the pat narrative of modernism's supersession of realism: "Modernism is an aesthetic category and realism is an epistemological one; the truth claim of the latter is irreconcilable with the formal dynamic of the former.

The historical novel at history's end: Virginia Woolf's The Years

He understood that at those moments that history lashes out at a people, violence is unavoidable; what he also knew was that we must never mistake its ineluctability for legitimacy.

Reading Albert Camus in North Africa

The record of modern states on this front, however, should leave some doubt about the ineluctability of this "logic." States have accepted and often also encouraged a variety of collective identities, both local and international.

A normative theory of sovereignty transfers

(61) Hart has an unblinking appreciation of the ineluctability of judicial discretion.

Living Originalism

The media bias and buzz about Ron Paul's supposed "ineluctability" may actually be an attempt to kill the best chance the Republicans have to recapture the White House in 2012.

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Unfortunately, it is not so easy to escape the ineluctability of History and this is exemplified in the epigraph of The Human Stain: "what is the rite of purification?

About society: a book review article of work on Roth and Kundera by Shostak and Ivanova

For them, the ineluctability of the realist security dilemma, whereby one actor's security is another actor's insecurity, epitomizes all that is wrong with mainstream (largely American) security theory.

European non-traditional security theory: from theory to practice