Meanings
- uncountableThe quality of being unputdownable.
Both go down with the ease of a Dirty Shirley, but neither captured my heart or attained that overused marketing promise of “unputdownability.”
2022 May 26, Michelle Ruiz, “Beachy, Sun-Kissed Novels Set on Nantucket and Cape Cod”, in The New York Times Book Review, New York, N.Y.: The New York Times Company, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 26 May 20222 more examples
Better to adapt the slogan of Count Mippipopolous in The Sun Also Rises who, when Jake suggests he should write a book about wine, answers: “All I want out of wines, Mr. Barnes, is to enjoy them,” and say: “All I want out of novels is to be able to read them.” Yet this quality of buttonholing readability, or unputdownability, is an important phenomenon. Some of the very greatest writers have it, as well as the most expert yarn-spinners and avowed entertainers.
1955 September 3, Maurice Richardson, “New Novels”, in The New Statesman and Nation: The Week-end Review, volume L, number 1278, London: Statesman and Nation Publishing Company, →ISSN, →OCLC, page 278, column 2But romance it is, and the ‘unputdownability’ of The Day of the Jackal is a professional and decorous assembly of original and fore-ordained ingredients from a quintessentially romantic genre.
1977, Bruce Merry, chapter 2, in Anatomy of the Spy Thriller, Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, →ISBN, page 65Synonyms: unputdownableness
Synonyms & antonyms
nounThe quality of being unputdownable.
Origin
Cite this entry
unputdownability. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 3, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/unputdownability
“unputdownability.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/unputdownability. Accessed November 3, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “unputdownability,” accessed November 3, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/unputdownability.
Source: unputdownability on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.