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What is "passable"

Crossword clues for passable

passable
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
passable
adjective
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ Despite the snow, all the major highways in upstate New York were still passable.
▪ He gave a passable imitation of Charlie Chaplin.
▪ Linda speaks passable Arabic.
▪ There was some bread, a little cheese and a passable French wine.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ But with the piles of snow that are pushed aside, the streets are only 60 % passable.
▪ Her hair was rolled into a passable pageboy and sometimes tied with a black ribbon.
▪ It's passable, he says, and it leads direct to Tmjillo.
▪ More recently, they turned to the government to ask for passable roads and better schools.
▪ Occasional crossings between the two chief areas were possible during periods when the Bering Strait became passable to land animals.
▪ Some sustained underwater excavation by Crossley and Yeadon, opened a route passable with big tanks, enabling exploration beyond.
▪ Stockwell, with his voice jacked up an octave, does a passable homage to Joe Flynn, the original Binghampton.
▪ The recent rain made the little stream passable and the water was very swift, shallow and rocky.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Passable

Passable \Pass"a*ble\, a. [Cf. F. passable.]

  1. Capable of being passed, traveled, navigated, traversed, penetrated, or the like; as, the roads are not passable; the stream is passablein boats.

    His body's a passable carcass if it be not hurt; it is a throughfare for steel.
    --Shak.

  2. Capable of being freely circulated or disseminated; acceptable; generally receivable; current.

    With men as with false money -- one piece is more or less passable than another.
    --L'Estrange.

    Could they have made this slander passable.
    --Collier.

  3. Such as may be allowed to pass without serious objection; tolerable; admissable; moderate; mediocre.

    My version will appear a passable beauty when the original muse is absent.
    --Dryden.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
passable

early 15c., "that may be crossed," from pass (v.) + -able, or from Old French passable "fordable, affording passage" (14c.). Sense of "tolerable" is first attested late 15c. Related: Passably.

Wiktionary
passable

a. 1 That may be pass or traverse. 2 tolerable; satisfactory; adequate.

WordNet
passable

  1. adj. able to be passed or traversed or crossed; "the road is passable" [ant: impassable]

  2. about average; acceptable; "more than adequate as a secretary" [syn: adequate, fair to middling]

  3. neither good nor bad; "an indifferent performance"; "a gifted painter but an indifferent actor"; "her work at the office is passable"; "a so-so golfer"; "feeling only so-so"; "prepared a tolerable dinner"; "a tolerable working knowledge of French" [syn: indifferent, so-so(p), tolerable]

Usage examples of "passable".

They located two roads, neither passable by now, one track leading to a shallow pit where many tons of apatite had been removed.

The young men went out hunting as usual, and I went out and found Birdie, and on her brought in four other horses, but the snow balled so badly that I went out and walked across the river on a very passable ice bridge, and got some new views of the unique grandeur of this place.

I had already seen half a hundred of girls, whom the town pronounced to be pretty, and who did not strike me as even passable.

Your Exaltedness knows, the locks are being reconstructed to be passable for steam riverboats.

Cyrus Harding, Herbert, Gideon Spilett, Neb, and the sailor were soon collected on the shore, at a place where the channel left a ford passable at low tide.

The priest of the temple of Serapis offered me a service of opaline glass, but I sent it to Servianus, with whom, out of regard for my sister Paulina, I tried to keep passable relations, at least at a distance.

Then, a messenger had struggled through to recall them to Zalt, because the Lan-achronans had attacked Salcer with more than ten companies, but the Fortieth Company squads had to wait until the roads were passable.

Dawn on Dalriada revealed a passable simulacrum of gigantic male urogenital organs, taking a leak into the reservoir forty meters below.

Zzadarray, Ebenth, Cathenn, and Marchell, Catswold dominated, were separated from the eleven belt nations by the Hell Pit and by dense masses of stone passable only through a long, tedious tunnel.

Cocking an eye at his earnest phiz, which was passable, but no pin-up, I would have said that she was overpricing him.

With the coach along, they were perforce obliged to take the roada longer, much more circuitous route than that cross-country one which, though much shorter, was passable for most of its length only to feet or hooves, and then so only in snowless seasons.

Servilia, assured that she looked passable if not as unruffled as she had some hours before, took her departure.

That second road ran through flat country and led to the passable fords that crossed the Coa further south.

As Iome had guessed, the walls were pitted with burrows from pocket crabs, but the tunnel seemed passable.

Nevertheless, it was a passable imitation, though bearing a closer kinship to the subsidence formations of the Martian Tithonius Lacus than to the hydrologically formed Grand Canyon of Arizona.