unmarriageable
Appearance
English
[edit]Etymology
[edit]From un- + marriageable.
Adjective
[edit]unmarriageable (comparative more unmarriageable, superlative most unmarriageable)
- Not marriageable, unsuitable for marriage.
- 1880, Henry James, chapter VI, in Washington Square[1], Harper & Brothers, →OCLC, page 50:
- You have always had a little way of alluding to her as an unmarriageable girl.
- 1912, David Graham Phillips, The Price She Paid[2], Gutenberg, published 2008:
- He had a way of pronouncing the word "miss" that made it an epithet, a sneer at her unmarried and unmarriageable state.
- That cannot be reconciled, inconsistent.
- 1841, Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Method of Nature:
- A link was wanting between two craving parts of nature, and he was hurled into being as the bridge over that yawning need, the mediator betwixt two else unmarriageable facts.
- 1902, George Saintsbury, Matthew Arnold[3], Gutenberg, published 2005:
- […] which is a very curious cross between two things that at first sight may seem unmarriageable, the Wordsworthian enthusiasm and the Byronic despair.