adjective

• Able to be accounted for or understood.

  ‘differences in schools were not explicable in terms of differences in intake’

  More example sentences

  • ‘Fear makes violence more explicable and hatred more understandable.’
  • ‘The trend is explicable in terms of a set of often unrelated and often seemingly innocuous market decisions and administrative policies.’
  • ‘But the moral status of animals, I suggest, also generates a responsibility that may not be fully explicable in terms of animals' interests.’
  • ‘No doubt about it, the evolution of biochemical systems, even complex multipart ones, is explicable in terms of evolution.’
  • ‘The world is completely explicable in its own terms.’
  • ‘Under pluralism, differences in access to resources or life chances etc. become largely explicable in terms of personal culpability or luck.’
  • ‘Even some of the cases that are explicable in ideological terms reveal subtle shadings just beneath the surface.’
  • ‘Another staff member felt perplexed and sad about the fact that one of the campers seemed angry with her all the time, for no explicable reason.’
  • ‘There's something else going on, though, which perhaps makes this mainstreaming of management culture more explicable.’
  • ‘These atrocities aren't readily explicable by any of the default analyses or classic responses of conventional politics.’
  • ‘Military precision, like magic, is not supposed to be easily explicable to the masses but a close look at the lead horseman was revealing.’
  • ‘Seen in this context, the sudden eruption of the Global Justice Movement in 1999, becomes explicable.’
  • ‘I am seething with rage at anyone who dares suggest that, in any way, such acts are even explicable, let alone justifiable.’
  • ‘And when one understands how these closeted types think, their whole attitude is all the more explicable.’
  • ‘Given how ubiquitous violence is today, he argues, our immunity to it on screen is explicable but terrifying.’
  • ‘In between each number a man kept shouting ‘stop the drug war’ for no explicable reason.’
  • ‘Human behaviour is explicable using the same geometric grids that have been produced by mathematicians.’
  • ‘It was much easier to see how paintings had been made: they became both more wonderful and more explicable.’
  • ‘The behaviour is explicable and the scenario interesting only, as I say, up to a point.’

  Synonyms

  explainable, interpretable, definable

  View synonyms