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Intelligibility   Listen
noun
Intelligibility  n.  The quality or state of being intelligible; clearness; perspicuity; definiteness.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Intelligibility" Quotes from Famous Books



... which is basely done, and to no purpose, or to a bad one, by another. Thus, the desire for emphasis itself may be the craving of a deadened imagination, or the passion of a vigorous one; and relief against shadow may be sought by one man only for sensation, and by another for intelligibility. John of Pisa undercuts fiercely, in order to bring out the vigor of life which no level contour could render; the Lombardi of Venice undercut delicately, in order to obtain beautiful lines and edges of faultless precision; but the base Indian craftsmen undercut only that people ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin

... Clearly this division must be so made as to assist the reader in his task. The primary purpose of all printing is to be read. Anything that adds to the legibility of the printing improves it; anything that detracts from its legibility harms it. How can we so divide words that the legibility and intelligibility of the text will be maintained, the line justified to register, and the beauty of the page enhanced? These ends—legibility, intelligibility, and beauty—are the aims of all the rules which have been devised for the division of words. These are the things the reader will see and by them ...
— Division of Words • Frederick W. Hamilton

... hanging in long thin straggle from Olmutz westward. "I have a spy out," said Schwerin; "but he has not returned yet,"—nor ever will, he might have added. If diligent readers will now take to their Map, and attend day by day, an invincible Predecessor has compelled what next follows into human intelligibility, and into the Diary Form, for their behoof;—readers of an idler turn can skip: but this confused hurry-scurry of marches issues in something which all will have ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... the actor; and lyrical poetry, the intensest kind of poetry, seeks the aid of music. But these comparative deficiencies are overbalanced, for all the highest purposes of art, by the width and depth, the intelligibility and power, the flexibility and multitudinous associations, of language. The other arts are limited in what they utter. There is nothing which has entered into the life of man which poetry cannot express. ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds

... misstated, by those writers upon taste, who have been guided by no experience of art; most singularly perhaps by Mr. Alison, who, confounding unity with uniformity, and leading his readers through thirty pages of discussion respecting uniformity and variety, the intelligibility of which is not by any means increased by his supposing uniformity to be capable of existence in single things; at last substitutes for these two terms, sufficiently contradictory already, those of similarity and dissimilarity, ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin

... was out of date, inasmuch as, in every branch, it lacked intelligibility. The masters were also necessarily, in some instances, anything but perfect, even when not lacking in knowledge of their subject. Nevertheless, the instruction as a whole, especially when one bears in mind ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes

... means a mere "abstract philosopher," but a good mathematician and well versed in the physical science of his time, not only proved this in an essay of exquisite clearness and intelligibility, now more than a century old,[16] but deduced from it some of its more important consequences, such as the constant turning of one face of ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley

... mistake may justly hope for a better reception than what from the first moment annoys the reader with a sense of ill-treatment. It is no wonder, he said, if such a manuscript be at once tossed aside with an imprecation. Legibility is the first and intelligibility the only other thing rendered due by the submission of ...
— Far Above Rubies • George MacDonald

... interpretation may have failed, and many a fact may not have been placed in its proper light. But in one thing, I hope, I have succeeded,—in convincing UNPREJUDICED readers, that Darwin's theory furnishes the key of intelligibility for the developmental history of the Crustacea, as for so many other facts inexplicable without it. The deficiencies of this attempt, therefore, must not be laid to the charge of the plan drawn out by the sure hand of the ...
— Facts and Arguments for Darwin • Fritz Muller

... the old tradition of the verbal infallibility of "the book of books" lingers more strongly than anywhere else except perhaps in Ulster, retranslations into modern English have been introduced perforce to save its bare intelligibility. It is quite easy today to find cultivated persons who have never read the New Testament, and on whom therefore it is possible to try the experiment of asking them to read the gospels and state what they have gathered as to the history and ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw

... spelling, For instance, "this" or "dizzy" would stand for ten; "catch" or "gush" would stand for 76, and the only difficulty is to make some word or phrase which will contain only the significant letters in the proper order, filled out with non-significants into some guise of meaning or intelligibility. ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens

... beings." Each story is followed by a series of short but brilliant criticisms on those pictures in which the story has been embodied by painters of various schools and periods, and illustrated by numerous spirited etchings and woodcuts, which add greatly to the value and intelligibility of the work. A future volume is promised which shall contain the "legends of the monastic orders, and the history of the Franciscans and the Dominicans, considered merely in their connection with the revival and the ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley

... as applied to the species is so well established among woodsmen that for the sake of intelligibility the combination Douglas Fir, which prevents confusion with the true firs and has been adopted by the Pacific Coast Lumberman's Association, is here accepted, notwithstanding that the name used by botanists, "Douglas ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James



Words linked to "Intelligibility" :   readability, comprehensibility, speech intelligibility, understandability, intelligible



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