Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun Lack of comprehension or understanding.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun Lack of comprehension or understanding.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun Lack of comprehension or understanding.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun Want or lack of
comprehension orunderstanding ;inability tounderstand .
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun an inability to understand
Etymologies
Sorry, no etymologies found.
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Examples
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Sometimes though, they mangle the word so bad and the look of utter incomprehension is so strong on the listening person's face that I do repeat what they tried to say but correctly.
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These create between them, with all the desire for understanding in the world, a barrier of misunderstanding and incomprehension, which is all the more fatal because it is so intangible, so obscure, so hard to put into words, so often actually unconscious or subconscious in the mind of one or of the other.
Sex and Common-Sense 1916
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While you can argue that it served a bridging function while a tradition-oriented establishment came to terms with a new reality, history will look back with blinking incomprehension at a policy that will seem to have been thought up by a preschooler, along the lines of "If I cover my eyes, can you see me?"
Monopoly, foreclosure-style Tom Toles 2010
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"It's been a constant battle," she said, detailing obstacles that ran the gamut from her family's incomprehension and dead-set opposition, to the scarcity and sometimes prohibitively high prices of fresh produce, to the near-total absence of meatless options from restaurant and cafeteria menus.
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At one point, the playwright had really screwed up this way from complete incomprehension of other types of people.
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The existence of the Arena and associated frames of reference merely shows that the relativistic effects are limited – special cases which will collapse if subjected to analysis from the point of view of the privileged frame, but only if they become relevant to the spacetime track of … he saw the incomprehension in her eyes and stopped.
Archive 2010-01-01 Blue Tyson 2010
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"Which is not what I came to see you about," I answered brusquely, somewhat nettled by their incomprehension.
THE DESCENT 2010
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"It's been a constant battle," she said, detailing obstacles that ran the gamut from her family's incomprehension and dead-set opposition, to the scarcity and sometimes prohibitively high prices of fresh produce, to the near-total absence of meatless options from restaurant and cafeteria menus.
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Lop-Ear's eyes came the plaintive look that always accompanied incomprehension, and I know that in my eyes must have been the same look.
CHAPTER XIII 2010
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Yet, the chances are that our own descendants will ask the same question, with the same incomprehension, about some of our practices today.
What will future generations condemn us for? Kwame Anthony Appiah 2010
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