unspeakable

comparative more unspeakable · superlative most unspeakable

1. Incapable of being spoken or uttered.

   1855-1882, Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, book xv, The endless pride and outstretching of man, unspeakable joys and sorrows.

   Synonyms: unutterable, ineffable, inexpressible

2. Impossible to speak about.

   It is true that during the first week hardly a day passed that Erskine did not address himself to Watt, on the subject of Watt's duties. But in the first week Watt's words had not yet begun to fail him, or Watt's world to become unspeakable.

   1953, Samuel Beckett, Watt, [Paris]: Olympia Press, →OCLC

3. Unfit or not permitted to be spoken or described.

   The miser will remember his hoard of gold, the robber his ill-gotten wealth, the angry and revengeful and merciless murderers their deeds of blood and violence in which they revelled, the impure and adulterous the unspeakable and filthy pleasures in which they delighted.

   1916, James Joyce, chapter III, in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, New York, N.Y.: B[enjamin] W. Huebsch, →OCLC, page 142

   Synonyms: unutterable, undiscussable

4. Extremely bad or objectionable.

   an unspeakable fool

   3 more examples

   an unspeakable play

   Yet to my horror I saw in its eaten-away and bone-revealing outlines a leering, abhorrent travesty on the human shape; and in its mouldy, disintegrating apparel an unspeakable quality that chilled me even more.

   1926, H.P. Lovecraft, The Outsider

   Anyone who goes into a voting booth on November the 8th and comes out saying, “I feel a hundred percent great about what I just did in there!,” is either lying to themselves, or did something unspeakable in that booth! And that means, as uncomfortable as this is, everyone has to own the floors of whoever you vote for, whether they are a lying handsy narcissistic sociopath, a hawkish Wall Street-friendly embodiment of everything that some people can’t stand about politics, an ill-tempered mountain molester with a radical dangerous tax plan that even he can’t defend, or a conspiracy-pandering political neophyte with no clear understanding of how government operates and who once recorded this folk rap about the virtues of bicycling.

   2016 October 16, “Third Parties”, in Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, season 3, episode 26, John Oliver (actor), via HBO

5. not comparablecomputingThat cannot be referenced in source code, due to having no usable name.

   an instance of an unspeakable type

   1 more example

   unspeakable field names

   2008, Trey Nash, Accelerated C# 2008, page 509

plural unspeakables

1. Something that cannot or must not be spoken about.

   Near-synonym: unthinkable

   1 more example

   The longer we don't speak about the unspeakables, the more harm they do to the relationship.

   2009, Dave Ulrich, Norm Smallwood, Kate Sweetman, The Leadership Code: Five Rules to Lead by, page 62

   Synonyms: unthinkable