Word.ws English Dictionary

How to use unintelligible in a sentence

21 example sentences · adjective

Unintelligible means not intelligible; unable to be understood. Example: “The curious feature of the art was that "horse-whisperers" actually talked to the animal, usually from mouth to ear, in an unintelligible tongue; which, however, the horses appeared to understand.”

Examples of unintelligible by meaning

adjectiveNot intelligible; unable to be understood.

  • The curious feature of the art was that "horse-whisperers" actually talked to the animal, usually from mouth to ear, in an unintelligible tongue; which, however, the horses appeared to understand.1936, Rollo Ahmed, The Black Art, London: Long, page 216
  • Unintelligible announcements on station loudspeakers are both irritating and confusing.1953 August, “Station Announcements”, in Railway Magazine, page 506
  • Lately, a study was made of oracle-bone inscriptions excavated in 1899 in the T'ang-yin county, 湯陰縣, of Honan Province and amounting to several thousand pieces, having unintelligible inscriptions whose dates nobody could determine.1959, Liang Ch’i-ch’ao, translated by Immanuel C. Y. Hsü, Intellectual Trends in the Ch’ing Period [清代學術概論], Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard...

More sentences with unintelligible

  • Instead, the speaker tries to fill the silence with unintelligible guttural sounds or meaningless words.2020, Blake J. Neff, chapter 8, in Proclamation!, page 129. From the entry filler word
  • After four days, the man claimed to be hearing hushed, unintelligible voices in his head.2009 November 23, “Gateway of the Mind”, in Creepypasta, archived from the original on 26 Nov 2009. From the entry onset
  • Obese and largely unintelligible, Don Vito represents a working-class white male grotesque, the picture of excess.2009, Emily Chivers Yochim, Skate Life, page 128. From the entry grotesque
  • Unfortunately, there were moments of pure indulgence, drunken boorishness and rambling unintelligible poetry midway through the evening.2009 July 31, “Nevermore With Jeffrey Combs As Edger Allan Poe Taps Every Emotion”, in Beverly Hills Courier, retrieved 17 Aug 2009. From the entry boorishness
  • The images it captures may be blurred, unintelligible or unwatchably tedious.1999, Peter Conrad, Modern Times, Modern Places. From the entry unwatchably
  • HINDI) may have “dialects” which are mutually unintelligible and hard to classify.1996, Bertil Tikkanen, "Languages of interethnic communication on the Indian Subcontinent (excluding Nepal)", in Stephen Adolphe Wurm et…. From the entry macrolanguage
  • Nonrevisions consisted of: repetition, topic change, no response, and unintelligible response.1992, Katherine Carol Hustad, The Effects of Partner Training on Interaction Between Augmentative Communication Users and Speaking…. From the entry nonrevision
  • Far from being a plenum of intelligibility, it is equiprimordially unintelligible.1986, [1978], John D. Caputo, The Mystical Element in Heidegger's Thought, page 247. From the entry equiprimordially
  • The problem is but referred back to an unintelligible preëstablishment of the world-order.1901, Vida F[rank] Moore, The Ethical Aspect of Lotze’s Metaphysics, New York, N.Y.: The Macmillan Company, page 59. From the entry preëstablishment
  • "A loud extremely irritating staticy noise came over the speaker, completely overpowering the newscaster, rendering his spiel completely unintelligible."2015, Arlene Hill, Tapestry. From the entry staticy
  • Often a prooflistener could clearly discriminate the words after repeated listening to a passage which the transcriber had previously found unintelligible.1979, Hartvig Dahl, “Characteristics of the Corpus”, in Word Frequencies of Spoken American English, Essex, Conn.; Aylesbury…. From the entry prooflistener
  • Striking Instacart workers have also opposed the company's "black box" app, which sets workers' pay via an unintelligible model that "mathwashes" their exploitation.2021 January 29, Nantina Vgontzas, Meredith Whittaker, “These Machines Won't Kill Fascism: Toward a Militant Progressive Vision for Tech”…. From the entry mathwash
  • One StarCrafter (unintelligible) take it out.2012 February 25, “As Video Gaming Goes Pro, Viewers Pay Up”, in NPR, archived from the original on 27 Feb 2012. From the entry StarCrafter
  • The vast majority of early Chinese immigrants, however, were rural males, laborers largely from Toishan County, whose local dialect is unintelligible to people from Guangzhou.1994, Barry Parr, San Francisco and the Bay Area, 3rd edition, Fodor's Travel Publications, Inc., page 100. From the entry Toishan
  • The complete flutter of the distant signal would probably so entirely destroy its identity that the crosstalk from it would be a substantially unintelligible noise.1909, De Loss K. Martin, Glenn D. Gillett and Isabel S. Bemis, “Some Possibilities and Limitations in Common Frequency Broadcasting”, in…. From the entry noise
  • For example, people in four counties to the southwest of Canton—in T'ai-shan, K'ai-p'ing, Hsin-hui, and En-p'ing counties—speak a version of Cantonese which is almost unintelligible to residents of Canton.1978, William L. Parish, Village and Family in Contemporary China, University of Chicago Press, →ISBN, →LCCN, →OCLC, page 26. From the entry T'ai-shan
  • At least a photograph of an Oscar for the splutteriest and most unintelligible performance in an otherwise for the most part excellent production is bequeathed with proper ceremony.1956 May 20, George Jean Nathan, “Awards a Few Hocked Oscars”, in Cleveland Plain Dealer, 115th year, number 141, Cleveland, Oh., →ISSN…. From the entry spluttery
  • Outside the baker’s shop, beside his printed name—printed name, by the way, often quite unintelligible to himself—is a very lively picture of white loaves and rolls, biscuits, krendels, baranki, cakes.1911 September 30, Stephen Graham, “The Compensations of Illiteracy”, in The Living Age, seventh series, volume LII (CCLXX overall)…. From the entry baranka

Meaning of unintelligible

  1. adjective Not intelligible; unable to be understood.

Full definition of unintelligible

Questions about unintelligible in a sentence

How do you use unintelligible in a sentence?
Unintelligible is used as an adjective. For example: “The curious feature of the art was that "horse-whisperers" actually talked to the animal, usually from mouth to ear, in an unintelligible tongue; which, however, the horses appeared to understand.”
What is a short sentence with unintelligible?
“One StarCrafter (unintelligible) take it out.”
What does unintelligible mean?
Unintelligible means not intelligible; unable to be understood.

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: unintelligible (page history and authors) and the entries each sentence comes from. Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the sentences, left out offensive ones and quotations older than 1900, and marked the word in each. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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