The word of the day for October 9th.
Today's word is inscrutable, spelled I-N-S-C-R-U-T-A-B-L-E.
Inscrutable is an adjective.
It means not readily investigated, interpreted, or understood.
It often describes things that are mysterious or difficult to comprehend.
Here's the word used in a sentence from Scientific American.
The paper makes significant progress on an unresolved aspect of the inscrutable math equation
that determines how the primes are distributed along the number line.
Scrutinizing the inscrutable may be futile.
Even close scrutiny can fail to decipher it.
Scrutinizing the scrutable, on the other hand, is likely to yield some understanding.
All of these scrut words have the same Latin root, scrutari, meaning to search or examine.
While scrutiny, scrutinized, and inscrutable all prove themselves useful in everyday discourse,
English speakers don't tend to call much on scrutable, which functions as a synonym of comprehensible.
With your word of the day, I'm Peter Sokolowski.
Visit merriamwebster.com today for definitions, wordplay, and trending word lookups.