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What is "comprehensible"

Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
comprehensible
adjective
COLLOCATIONS FROM CORPUS
■ ADVERB
more
▪ They then worked as a class to produce a new rewritten version which they hoped would be more comprehensible.
▪ More than a third of directors want more summarised information and want to see it in a more comprehensible, graphic form.
■ NOUN
input
▪ The solution to our problems as teachers, then, is to provide comprehensible input.
▪ In this respect, the learner exercises his own initiative to ensure the proper supply of comprehensible input.
▪ At the same time, of course, it assures them of comprehensible input.
▪ What communication reduces to is comprehensible input.
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ comprehensible instructions
▪ Each entry in the guide is brief and immediately comprehensible.
▪ The music was experimental, and not comprehensible to the average concert-goer.
▪ Visual aids can make lessons much more interesting and comprehensible.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ Her speech was slurred and barely comprehensible.
▪ In so doing, it gave them system and continuity and went far to make economic life comprehensible.
▪ Land warfare sixty-five years after Waterloo would still have been comprehensible to Napoleon.
▪ Magnificence is admirable if not always comprehensible, humility is very unattractive to the modern Western mind.
▪ Metaphor, it turns out, is the key to making computers comprehensible.
▪ Our treatment in this chapter will try to be as informal as possible in order to be comprehensible.
▪ Photographic reportage, the cinema and television have produced a lingua franca of universally comprehensible pictures.
▪ The more directly comprehensible parts of the Challenger's programme were thus made available to the public at a provisional stage.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Comprehensible

Comprehensible \Com"pre*hen"si*ble\, a. [L. comprehensibilis: cf. F. compre['e]hensible.]

  1. Capable of being comprehended, included, or comprised.

    Lest this part of knowledge should seem to any not comprehensible by axiom, we will set down some heads of it.
    --Bacon.

  2. Capable of being understood; intelligible; conceivable by the mind.

    The horizon sets the bounds . . . between what is and what is not comprehensible by us.
    --Locke.

Related phrases:
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
comprehensible

1520s, "able to be contained," from Latin comprehensibilis, from comprehensus, past participle of comphrehendere (see comprehend). Meaning "able to be understood" is from c.1600. Related: Comprehensibly; comprehensibility.

Wiktionary
comprehensible

a. Able to be comprehended.

WordNet
comprehensible

adj. capable of being comprehended or understood; "an idea comprehensible to the average mind" [syn: comprehendible] [ant: incomprehensible]

Usage examples of "comprehensible".

Hassan of Aleppo sat, with a comprehensible weapon thus laid upon his knees, I should have taken my chance, should have attacked him with the lamp, with a chair, with anything that came to my hand.

That accent was quite a bit more comprehensible to her American ear than the Glaswegian dialect spoken by so many of the people associated with the monastery on Iona.

That is how quick natures will often be cold and hard, or not much moved, when the positive crisis arrives, and why it is that they are prepared for astonishing leaps over the gradations which should render their conduct comprehensible to us, if not excuseable.

For what are the comprehensible terrors of man compared with the interlinked terrors and wonders of God!

I asked, overenunciating each word so that I was comprehensible to him, and to me.

Her desire to meet the critical English ladies with a towering reputation in one department of human enterprise was comprehensible, considering the natural apprehensiveness of the half-wild girl before such a meeting.

It was a childishly simple-minded attack, instantly comprehensible and thus appealing to the city mob.

He perceived the frustration, the angry hunger, the longing for direction, for unequivocal and comprehensible answers.

The sergeant would have preferred such familiar and comprehensible commotion to the almost eerie restraint that now confronted him.

They had destroyed the familiar, the comprehensible, in favour of-what?

And a voice, dinning into the ears of my mind, repeating with endless, stomach-churning patience, collections of syllables I strained desperately to sort into comprehensible phrases.

One of the lord Driver's advisers, the one they called the Navigator -- the lord Cairns, a pushy character who'd tried his patience earlier with persistent and barely comprehensible questions about, of all things, calculating-machines -- leaned into the conversation from a couple of spaces to the high lord's right, vulgarly waving a fork on which a morsel of scallop was impaled.

I was silent an instant, thinking how to find words passably comprehensible and yet conventionally circumlocutory and euphemistic.

It took thirteen years of hard labor on his part and on mine to discombobulate my trust in the normal system of cognition that makes the world around us comprehensible to us.

What the golem said as he wrenched the prickly crown off was not comprehensible, since it was in plant language, but a bleeding heart vine blushed, a trumpet lily sounded a retreat, an artillery plant fired off a salute, and a never-never plant wilted.