UNINTELLIGIBLE

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does unintelligible mean? 

• UNINTELLIGIBLE (adjective)
  The adjective UNINTELLIGIBLE has 2 senses:

1. poorly articulated or enunciated, or drowned by noise

2. hard or impossible to understand

  Familiarity information: UNINTELLIGIBLE used as an adjective is rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• UNINTELLIGIBLE (adjective)

Sense 1

Meaning:

Poorly articulated or enunciated, or drowned by noise

Context example:

unintelligible speech

Similar:

slurred; thick (spoken as if with a thick tongue)

Also:

incomprehensible; uncomprehensible (difficult to understand)

Antonym:

intelligible (well articulated or enunciated, and loud enough to be heard distinctly)

Derivation:

unintelligibility (incomprehensibility as a consequence of being unintelligible)

Sense 2

Meaning:

Hard or impossible to understand

Synonyms:

opaque; unintelligible

Similar:

incomprehensible; uncomprehensible (difficult to understand)

Derivation:

unintelligibility (nonsense that is simply incoherent and unintelligible)

 Context examples 

Yes; I cannot speak well enough to be unintelligible.

(Northanger Abbey, by Jane Austen)

The woman asked her what she did there, but she looked very strangely and only returned a confused and unintelligible answer.

(Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)

They were very long, very numerous, very hard—perfectly unintelligible, some of them, to me—and I was generally as much bewildered by them as I believe my poor mother was herself.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

Beyond this, it must ever be unintelligible to Emma.

(Emma, by Jane Austen)

Calling back the servant, therefore, she commissioned him, though in so breathless an accent as made her almost unintelligible, to fetch his master and mistress home instantly.

(Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen)

He had understood nothing, and the only idea he had gathered was that evolution was a dry-as-dust theory, of a lot of little men possessed of huge and unintelligible vocabularies.

(Martin Eden, by Jack London)

Your remarks are irrelevant and unintelligible.

(The Lost World, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

I answered as loud as I could in several languages, and he often laid his ear within two yards of me: but all in vain, for we were wholly unintelligible to each other.

(Gulliver's Travels into several remote nations of the world, by Jonathan Swift)

To Fanny, however, who had known too much opposition all her life to find any charm in it, all this was unintelligible.

(Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen)

He coloured, and stammered out an unintelligible reply.

(Sense and Sensibility, by Jane Austen)