unsusceptible

comparative more unsusceptible · superlative most unsusceptible

1. Not susceptible.

   For the uninitiated or unsusceptible, it’s a dog thing: you wouldn’t understand.

   2007 May 13, Liesl Schillinger, “The Year of the Dog”, in New York Times

   5 more examples

   Imagination, a licentious and vagrant faculty, unsusceptible of limitations, and impatient of restraint, has always endeavored to baffle the logician, to perplex the confines of distinction, and burst the enclosures of regularity.

   1751 May 28, Samuel Johnson, “Samuel Johnson: Selected Poetry and Prose”, in Frank Brady, W. K. Wimsatt, editors, The Rambler, Berkeley: University of California Press, page 202

   Mortals, rejoice! the very Angels quit Their mansions unsusceptible of change, Amid your pleasant bowers to sit, And through your sweet vicissitudes to range!

   1817, William Wordsworth, Vernal Ode, Stanza III

   It would be mortifying to the feelings of many ladies, could they be made to understand how little the heart of man is affected by what is costly or new in their attire; how little it is biased by the texture of their muslin, and how unsusceptible of peculiar tenderness towards the spotted, the sprigged, the mull, or the jackonet.

   1803 (date written), [Jane Austen], Northanger Abbey; published in Northanger Abbey: And Persuasion. […], volume (please specify |volume=I or II), London: John Murray, […], 20 December 1817 (indicated as 1818), →OCLC

   I was in a dull state of nerves, such as everybody is occasionally liable to; unsusceptible to enjoyment or pleasurable excitement; one of those moods when what is pleasure at other times, becomes insipid or indifferent; the state, I should think, in which converts to Methodism usually are, when smitten by their first “conviction of sin.”

   1873, John Stuart Mill, chapter 5, in Autobiography

   Of all social phenomena none is perhaps as protean and, consequently, as unsusceptible to binary classification as religion.

   1994, José Casanova, chapter 2, in Public Religions in the Modern World, University of Chicago Press, page 40

   Synonyms: insusceptible