colourable

Adjective

colourable (not comparable)

1. (obsolete) Colourful.
2. Apparently true; specious; potentially justifiable.
   • Doth the master make any bargaine, or dispatch that pleaseth not? it is immediately smothered and suppressed, soone after forging causes, and devising colourable excuses, to excuse the want of execution or answer.1603, Michel de Montaigne, chapter 8, in John Florio, transl., The Essayes […], book II, London: […] Val[entine] Simmes for Edward Blount […], →OCLC
   • they told him their comming was for some extraordinary tooles and shift of apparell; by this colourable excuse, they obtained 6. or 7. more to their confederacie […].1612, John Smith, Proceedings of the English Colonie in Virginia, Chapel Hill 1988 (Select Edition of his Writings), p.178
3. (archaic, sometimes) Deceptive; fake, misleading.
   • Glauce, what needs this colourable word, / To cloke the cause, that hath it selfe bewrayd?1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book III, Canto II”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC
   1. (archaic, sometimes) In appearance only; not in reality what it purports to be, hence counterfeit, feigned.
4. That can be coloured.
   • This matter, however, is not itself coloured, but is only capable of exhibiting colours, by the addition of other matters : and hence we have ventured to call it the colourable, rather than the colouring parts of the plant, by which we merely indicate its property of becoming coloured, but not its...1811, Daniel Ellis, Farther inquiries into the changes induced on atmospheric air, by the germination of seeds, the vegetation of plants, and the respiration of animals, page 117
   • These results were discovered whilst investigating uniquely edge colourable graphs.1978, A. G. Thomason, “Hamiltonian Cycles and Uniquely Edge Colorable Graphs”, in Advances in graph theory: Volume 1977, →ISBN, page 259