How to Use ineffable in a Sentence
ineffable
adjective-
In the face of the ineffable, A’s fans have been grasping for metaphor.
—Ellen Cushing, The Atlantic, 1 Oct. 2024
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What is the ineffable deficit between very good and great?
—Leslie Felperin, The Hollywood Reporter, 7 Sep. 2022
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The ineffable is that which cannot or should not be uttered.
—Ian Bogost, The Atlantic, 4 Apr. 2018
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That ineffable quality that drew him to her in the first place?
—Kayleigh Roberts, Marie Claire, 25 Nov. 2018
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That will to stardom, that ineffable self-belief, is the key to Fanny’s code, and Michele cracks it.
—Peter Marks, Washington Post, 28 Sep. 2022
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There are people who, in the depths of some ineffable despair or rage, desire to exit the world in a hail of bullets and a flood of blood.
—The Editors, National Review, 2 Oct. 2017
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But this new Blade Runner is lacking the ineffable thing that a self-aware android might crave most: a soul.
—Richard Lawson, vanityfair.com, 3 Oct. 2017
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Sometimes an actor seemed to glow with a private, ineffable fire, only to lose the spark halfway through the play.
—Alexandra Schwartz, The New Yorker, 31 Jan. 2022
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There's also an ineffable quality to the risk in all this.
—Andrew Sharp, SI.com, 2 July 2018
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Some ineffable X factor that transcends all of the above?
—Jp Brammer, Los Angeles Times, 7 Feb. 2024
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Watch the movie to get a sense of that ineffable ingredient, and the sometimes-subtle ways that Streisand deploys it.
—Globe Staff, BostonGlobe.com, 26 May 2022
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When trying to quantify the ineffable allure of the femme française, one obvious trait is right in our faces—and theirs, much of the time: French girl hair.
—Calin Van Paris, Vogue, 25 Sep. 2017
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If Liu is a conduit, so too, in some ineffable sense, is Costanzo.
—Sara Holdren, Vulture, 5 Sep. 2024
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Get a musubi or two, which is marvellous, the squishy pillow of rice, the ineffable Spamminess of Spam, the sweet smear of teriyaki.
—Helen Rosner, The New Yorker, 16 Feb. 2025
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After a lifetime of her ineffable grace on stage, in film, and on television, Tyson died on Jan. 28 at 96.
—Natalie Johnson, NBC News, 1 Feb. 2021
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That ineffable Kylie essence is always present regardless of whether Minogue wrote on a song or not.
—Rebecca Milzoff, Billboard, 29 Feb. 2024
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If so, the variations have been endless, the themes ineffable.
—Mark Rozzo, Vanities, 30 May 2018
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When Liszt was on the rise, in his teens and twenties, the man of the hour was Sigismond Thalberg, an Austrian pianist prized for his ineffable singing line.
—Alex Ross, The New Yorker, 4 Sep. 2023
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The sloth, about the size of a large sheepdog, hung upside down and stared at me with an expression of ineffable sadness on its furry face.
—New York Times, 29 May 2018
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There's this ineffable sense of stiffness at lower frame rates that, for certain types of games, is a detriment.
—Wired, 8 Dec. 2019
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La’eeb, the ineffable mascot, held a rainbow banner that was on fire.
—Sam Knight, The New Yorker, 3 Dec. 2022
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There does seem to be something extra going on with the food these days: crispier dosas, brighter flavors, more of that ineffable taste of home.
—Soleil Ho, San Francisco Chronicle, 28 July 2022
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There’s an ineffable beauty in the shot of a pecan being deshelled, the meat suddenly revealed.
—Esther Zuckerman, IndieWire, 25 Jan. 2025
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The whole event is a collaboration between the ineffable space of your unique soul and a world made by others; and the end result is a one-of-a-kind encounter.
—Time, 20 Sep. 2023
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The object of Hoare’s own quest is less actual whales than Dürer’s access to the ineffable.
—BostonGlobe.com, 26 Sep. 2021
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An attempt to capture the ineffable feelings of kids as summer ends falls flat.
—Matthew Lickona, National Review, 13 Aug. 2022
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By stirring us so powerfully, birds bring us up against the ineffable in a telling, pathos-laden way.
—Ben Downing, WSJ, 16 Nov. 2018
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To me, its defining trait is an ineffable comic sound, as nervy and raucous as the subway during rush hour.
—Jason Zinoman, New York Times, 14 Sep. 2022
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There are also plenty of new songs (even the trio of musical numbers carried over from the original have extensive new lyrics from Benj Pasek and Justin Paul), though none of them have the same special, ineffable quality of the originals.
—Josh Spiegel, The Hollywood Reporter, 22 Mar. 2025
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Some things prove ineffable, like this multi-perspective story of a woman, her daughter, her personal assistant, her so-so suitor, her long-ago camp crush and his wife — all of whom spend a weekend together.
—Bethanne Patrick, Los Angeles Times, 28 Feb. 2025
Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'ineffable.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.
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