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What is "dispensable"

Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
dispensable
adjective
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ Part-time workers are considered dispensable in times of recession.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ As it happens, explicit truth claims are not entirely dispensable.
▪ But neither do such concepts reduce to the corresponding predicates, nor indeed are such predicates entirely dispensable.
▪ Even dessert was dispensable, although a choice of liqueurs was on the sideboard.
▪ Even the District Secretary was not averse to reminding his tutor-organisers that they were dispensable.
▪ He was depressed that this absolutely dispensable element of the culture of his origin had followed them to the United States.
▪ Literature, being a form of art, unlike language, is dispensable.
▪ Tenure was necessary on the main campus, he said, but dispensable on the new Arizona International Campus.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Dispensable

Dispensable \Dis*pen"sa*ble\, a. [LL. dispensabilis. See Dispense.]

  1. Capable of being dispensed or administered.

  2. Capable of being dispensed with.
    --Coleridge.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
dispensable

1530s, "subject to dispensation," from Medieval Latin dispensabilis, from dispensare (see dispense). Meaning "that can be done without" is from 1640s. Related: Dispensability.

Wiktionary
dispensable

a. 1 Able to be done without; able to be expended; easily replaced. 2 Capable of being dispensed; distributable. 3 (context of a law, rule, vow, etc. English) Subject to dispensation; possible to relax, exempt from, or annul. 4 (context biochemistry nutrition of an amino acid English) Not essential to be taken in as part of an organism's diet, as it can be synthesized de novo.

WordNet
dispensable

adj. capable of being dispensed with or done without; "dispensable items of personal property" [ant: indispensable]

Usage examples of "dispensable".

Moreover, he achieved this aim, although he failed in his further aim of making his own person appear dispensable, or at least easily replaceable.

It is the first precious stone that will be destroyed if the continuance of Castalia is imperiled, not only because it is the frailest of our possessions, but also because to laymen it is undoubtedly the most dispensable aspect of Castalia.

For a moment he was utterly dispensable, exempt from all responsibilities, not required to perform any tasks, to do any thinking.

So it was not really the virgin portraying Teteoinan who died, but some dispensable female slave or a female prisoner captured from another people.

They seize one of their more dispensable females and truss her as they would truss a deer caught alive, and they dance as they would dance after a successful hunt.

By now, there are not many dispensable women left in Tihó or the surrounding countryside for me to try on them.

But the wicked ones—and, even more lamentably, the totally useless and worthless and dispensable ones—they all go on cluttering our world, long beyond the life span they deserve.

Manotti complained at one point as he gutted the dispensable refrigerator unit.