tractility
tractility noun: the quality of being tractile (capable of being drawn or stretched out at length).
Noun
tractility (uncountable)
- The quality of being tractile (capable of being drawn or stretched out at length).
- Silver, whose Ductility and Tractility are very much inferiour to those of Gold, was, by my procuring, drawn out to so slender a Wire, that, when we measur’d it, which was somewhat troublesom to do, with a long and accurate measure, we found, that eight Yards of it did not yet fully counterpoise...1673, Robert Boyle, Essays of the Strange Subtilty, Great Efficacy, Determinate Nature of Effluviums, London: M. Pitt, “If the Strange Subtilty of Effluviums,” Chapter 2, p. 8
- We shall not […] anticipate these chemical details […] but will confine ourselves at present to that potent talisman “Coal,” at whose bidding, and whilst in a state of combustion, the minerals are decomposed and liquefied, and their gritty, brittle, stony qualities changed to those of tractility...1861, John Henry Pepper, The Playbook of Metals, London: Routledge, Warne, and Routledge, Introduction, p. 4
- Synonyms:
- ductility
Synonyms of tractility
Origin of tractility
From tractile + -ity.
Questions about tractility
- What does tractility mean?
- Tractility means the quality of being tractile (capable of being drawn or stretched out at length).
- What part of speech is tractility?
- Tractility is a noun.
Words near tractility in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: tractility (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
Last updated:
Cite this entry: “tractility.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/tractility. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
