Word of the Day:

July 7, 2022

inscrutable

adjective in-SKROO-tuh-bul

What it Means

Inscrutable means "not readily investigated, interpreted, or understood." It often describes what is mysterious or difficult to comprehend.

// The famously reclusive author remains an inscrutable figure even after the publication of some of her personal correspondence.

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Inscrutable in Context

“Rosters were reconstructed by enlisting former NHLers, players from the KHL and other leagues in Europe and from the college ranks and major-junior level. There is enough of a mixture of guys who are a bit past their prime and others who are relatively unknown or waiting to be discovered to make the outcome more inscrutable than usual.” — Marty Klinkenberg, The Globe and Mail (Toronto, Canada), 5 Feb. 2022

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Did You Know?

Scrutinizing the inscrutable may be futile: even close scrutiny can fail to decipher it. Scrutinizing the scrutable, on the other hand, is likely to yield some understanding. All of these scrut- words have the same Latin root: scrutari, meaning “to search or examine.” While scrutiny, scrutinize, and inscrutable all prove themselves useful in everyday discourse, English speakers don’t tend to call much on scrutable, which functions as a synonym of comprehensible.