incognizable

comparative more incognizable · superlative most incognizable

1. Not cognizable; incapable of being recognised.

   All this time the incognizable nouveau was smoking slowly and calmly, and looking at nothing at all with his black buttonlike eyes.

   1922, E. E. Cummings, chapter 7, in The Enormous Room, New York: Boni and Liveright, page 153

   3 more examples

   1658, Thomas Saintserf (translator), Entertainments of the Cours: or, Academical Conversations, compiled by Melchior de Marmet, London, p. 104, A dead Body is always incognizable, not only because it is ordinarily changed, but because it neither speaks, nor acts; and for that the qualities of its Soul, which we should know, are departed with her, and have left nothing but a trunk, and a lump without motion.

   The lettish race […] was not a primitive stock, as the finnish, the germanic, or slavonian, but a distinct branch, now become incognizable, of the Slavi […]

   1799, William Tooke, View of the Russian Empire during the Reign of Catharine II and to the close of the present Century, London: Longman and Rees, Volume 1, Book 2, p. 455

   […] if therefore position is, to the nascent intelligence, incognizable except as the position of something that produces an impression on the organism; how is it possible for the idea of position ever to be dissociated from that of body?

   1855, Herbert Spencer, The Principles of Psychology, London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, Part 2, Chapter 13, § 62, p. 233