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Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
unrecognizable
adjective
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ Completely shaved and wearing prison clothes, the two sisters were unrecognizable to each other.
▪ The explosion left nothing but small, unrecognizable pieces of the aircraft scattered over the field.
▪ We've recovered two bodies from the wreckage, but they are unrecognizable.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ Completely shaved, in prison clothes, they were unrecognizable to each other.
▪ Each time he pointed to something about me, it was as if it fell away from me, foreign and unrecognizable.
▪ Finally there was the unrecognizable specialist equipment, acquired for some particular reason or other, but whose purpose was not apparent.
▪ He's unrecognizable as the boy we once knew.
▪ Ideally, the reading courses of the 1990s will not only look different to today's teachers, they will be unrecognizable.
▪ If we were gibbons, our lives would be unrecognizable.
▪ The jaws were unrecognizable by this stage, and all the teeth were exposed as isolated teeth.
▪ The joy is being unrecognizable from role to role.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
unrecognizable

1817, from un- (1) "not" + recognizable (see recognize (v.)). Related: Unrecognizably.

Wiktionary
unrecognizable

a. That cannot be recognized, especially because of substantial changes.

WordNet
unrecognizable

adj. defying recognition as e.g. because of damage or alteration [syn: unrecognisable]

Usage examples of "unrecognizable".

At the prison hospital the boys with sharp knives had spent a leisurely three years picking his carcass free of bits of concrete and wood and paper pellets,, unrecognizable, unspendable shreds of government green.

I opened the door and found the young woman leaning against the sink, running a finger over the discolored portion of her thin face as she stared at her almost unrecognizable image in the mirror.

Sometimes she would be assisted by a giant figure, black as a bible and stripped to the waist, an unrecognizable apprentice who, obedient as a djin, would calmly execute her every order.

The wedding went off without incident, and our two frati, almost unrecognizable in the garish vestments of the Armeniyan Church, ably supported the Metropolitan in his conduct of the service.

Eric thrilled with the pride of belonging to a race that had worked out a system of recorded signals as clever as the alphabet, that could take ordinary numbers and squeeze them into unrecognizable shapes, pulling out a piece here, a piece there.

Carved from olivewood, a little bigger than a shoe box, it had a tin lid perforated by tiny airholes and inset with the icon of an unrecognizable saint.

Kevin Baldridge was not only far away but the photo had been slightly overexposed and, because he was in motion, his figure was blurred and completely unrecognizable.

Lassner issued the instructions, she ignored them and went her own way and, within a couple of days, the purses, as new, but quite unrecognizable, would be for sale on a stall somewhere.

Ryan had no doubt that the road, overgrown as it was with grass shoots as sharp as steel needles, pierced and cracked by stunted, thorny trees tough enough to survive the acid fall, had been unrecognizable before the stickies had taken that route.

Thus a couple of wandering natives, unrecognizable under their dirty stormproof blankets and their scarcely, thinner layers of grease and grime, watched impassively, incuriously, while a box floated pendant from its parachute from sky to ground.

The platters were nearly empty, and the tablecloth was stained and littered with potato salad, cole slaw, miniature meatballs, tomato sauce, mustard, ham scraps, ring tabs, ashes, and things unrecognizable.

Thus, very shortly, Virgilia Samms found herself, completely helpless and completely unrecognizable, walking awkwardly out of the house between a businesslike doctor and a solicitous nurse.

Here the slashing had been vicious, leaving the subject that Amanda had known to be a breathtakingly beautiful woman nearly unrecognizable.

It glistened with panels of complex texture, and there were apertures in the silvery skin within which more machinery gleamed, unrecognizable.

For an instant, he saw a snarl of fangs, and a malicious glare, and then the sword made solid contact, and what was there was rendered unrecognizable as it disintegrated.