illegibility

il·leg·i·ble

(ĭ-lĕj′ə-bəl)

adj.

Not legible or decipherable.

il·leg′i·bil′i·ty, il·leg′i·ble·ness n.

il·leg′i·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:

Switch to new thesaurus

Noun

illegibility - the quality of writing (print or handwriting) that cannot be deciphered

handwriting - the activity of writing by hand; "handwriting can be slow and painful for one with arthritis"

incomprehensibility - the quality of being incomprehensible

legibility, readability - a quality of writing (print or handwriting) that can be easily read

Translations

عَدَم مَقْروئيَّة، تَعَذُّر قِراءَة

nečitelnost

ulæselighed

Unleserlichkeit

illisibilité

olvashatatlanság

òaî aî vera ólæsilegur

uleselighet

nečitateľnosť

okunaksızlık

无法辨认

illegibility

n → Unleserlichkeit f

Collins German Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged 7th Edition 2005. © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1980 © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1997, 1999, 2004, 2005, 2007

illegible

(iˈledʒəbl) adjective

(almost) impossible to read; not legible. His writing is illegible.

ilˈlegibly adverb

ilˌlegiˈbility noun

Mentioned in ?

References in classic literature ?

poor thing!" says Briggs (who was thinking of twenty- four years back, and that hectic young writing-master whose lock of yellow hair, and whose letters, beautiful in their illegibility, she cherished in her old desk upstairs).

View in context

A kind of illegibility, though a different kind, stole over Mr Boffin's face.

View in context

This illegibility gives the artist the chance to tell the viewer that clarity of ideas will only be achieved once the process of creativity is understood.

The sound of the quill

Namely, Bacon's natural philosophy undertakes to overcome this obstacle, while Shakespeare's literary fiction embraces the ethical possibilities that might accompany illegibility and confusion.

Empirical Errors: The Comedy of Errors and "Knowing" Metamorphosing Forms

Petrol pricing in Nigeria illuminates the messiness of formal structures, as different mechanisms, in tension with each other, produce tangled incoherencies and illegibility. A particular focus on 'shelter' as a category in the consumer price index illustrates the accretion of notions of human value under a single rubric, which is itself key to producing an economic infrastructure.

Jane I. Guyer, Legacies, Logics, Logistics: essays in the anthropology of the platform economy

13), has been largely inaccessible to scholars due to the rarity and near illegibility of the few extant manuscripts of the work.

The Brahmayamalatantra or Picumata, vol. II: The Religious Observances and Sexual Rituals of the Tantric Practitioner: Chapters 3, 21, and 45. A Critical Edition and Annotated Translation

Rather than an act of straightforward and traditionally legible scholarship, Snorton prizes illegibility for its potentials and recognizes it as an omission, created by power, that must be read in absence.

A Lexicon of Black and Trans Life (and Death)

The subject matter feels insignificant, however--or, rather, significant explicitly for its illegibility, serving mainly to strand the viewer with the architectonic superstructure, pondering a geometry of unreadable visual shrapnel.

Joe Rudko: PDX CONTEMPORARY ART

The petitioner adopted that the appointment of Kashmala is not in accordance with the law and because it does not fulfil the relevant provisions of law which provide the mandate and illegibility of the appointment of ombudsperson.

ICA filed with IHC against Kashmala's appointment as ombudsperson

Some of the documents Watson transcribes are written by a trained hand; others are scrawled by people with limited literacy, with handwriting she compares to "a spider walking across the page." Older scripts--court hand, for instance, which was used by lawyers and clerks beginning in the medieval period (and eventually became stylized into illegibility)--have long, narrow strokes and letters jammed together to save space, making it a challenge to find where one word ends and another begins.