Word.ws English Dictionary

unwinnable

unwinnable adjective: unable to be won.

Adjective

unwinnable (not comparable)

  1. Unable to be won.
    • The “Zarfian Cruelty Scale” rates games as Merciful, Polite, Tough, Nasty, or Cruel. The scale describes how works of IF become unwinnable, especially how and when the interactor (here a player, and one trying to win) learns this.2007, Jeremy Douglass, Command Lines, page 88
    • This does mitigate the problem of the game playing itself, but it doesn't change the fact that at higher levels a lot of the games are either unwinnable or unloseable depending on the luck of "obey" or "disobey".2009 December 10, joye, “Obey the Game”, in Jay Is Games, archived from the original on 14 Feb 2025

Synonyms of unwinnable

Origin of unwinnable

From un- + winnable.

Words formed from unwinnable

Questions about unwinnable

What does unwinnable mean?
Unwinnable means unable to be won.
What part of speech is unwinnable?
Unwinnable is an adjective.

Words near unwinnable in the dictionary

  1. Unwinesque
  2. unwinged
  3. unwinking
  4. unwinkingly
  5. unwinnability
  6. unwinnable
  7. unwinnably
  8. unwinning
  9. unwinnowed
  10. Unwins
  11. unwinsome

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: unwinnable (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.

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