unmarriageable

English

Etymology

From un- +‎ marriageable.

Adjective

unmarriageable (comparative more unmarriageable, superlative most unmarriageable)

1. 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.

2. 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.