ineradicable

comparative more ineradicable · superlative most ineradicable

1. Not able to be eradicated; (of a root, plant, etc.) too deep to remove.

   And in the corn, and vines, and meadow-grass, Teemed ineradicable poisonous weeds Draining their growth […]

   1820, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Prometheus Unbound, London: C & J Ollier, act I, scene 1, page 27

   5 more examples

   The procatarctick causes render the Disease more or less curable: a Consumption of grief, as it moves more slowly than others, so its malign effects are impressed with a more certain and irresistable force; wherefore unless prevented in the bud, takes an ineradicable root.

   1666, Gideon Harvey, chapter 32, in Morbus Anglicus: or, The Anatomy of Consumptions, London: Nathaniel Brook, page 197

   But there is in man a conscience as well as a consciousness, an ineradicable aspiration towards virtue, which is certainly no less difficult to understand.

   1920, Frederick Soddy, Science and life: Aberdeen addresses, p. 166. Lecture to the Aberdeen University Christian Union, Marischal College, "Matter, Energy, Consciousness and Spirit" (Apr 25, 1919)

   “All sensible people know that vanity is the most devastating, the most universal and the most ineradicable of the passions that afflict the soul of man, and it is only vanity that makes him deny its power. […]”

   1928, W. Somerset Maugham, “His Excellency”, in Ashenden: Or the British Agent

   But the stairs daunted her. That fall had left on her mind an ineradicable fear of taking risks with her unwieldy limbs, even for the reward of taking over the supervision of her own shop.

   1950, Norman Lindsay, Dust or Polish?, Sydney: Angus and Robertson, page 72

   While they were well aware of many of the problems of their autism, they had a respect for their differentness, even a pride. Indeed, in some autistic people this sense of radical and ineradicable differentness is so profound as to lead them to regard themselves, half jokingly, almost as members of another species […]

   1995, Oliver Sacks, “An Anthropologist on Mars”, in An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales, New York: Knopf, pages 276–277

   Synonyms: deep-rooted, firm, inannihilable, ingrained, inveterate, irradicable