How to Use thinkable in a Sentence

thinkable

adjective
Definition of thinkablenext
Synonyms for thinkablenext
  • They divorced during a time when that was barely thinkable.
  • For many in the U.S. and around the world, the very notion of the public good has grown less thinkable.
    — Charles McCrary, The New Republic, 4 Apr. 2022
  • That’s starting to seem thinkable for the first time in a long time.
    — Sunset Magazine, 21 Dec. 2022
  • One player drove the green on a 384-yard hole—and this was long before drives anywhere near that long were thinkable.
    — Andrew Beaton, WSJ, 15 July 2021
  • This has been the worst season of college football — in every way thinkable — of my lifetime.
    — Nick Canepa Columnist, San Diego Union-Tribune, 12 Dec. 2020
  • That would have been unthinkable in early 2022, but war tends to make the unthinkable, thinkable.
    — Kyle Mizokami, Popular Mechanics, 27 July 2022
  • That would have been unthinkable in early 2022, but war tends to make the unthinkable, thinkable.
    — Kyle Mizokami, Popular Mechanics, 27 July 2022
  • Hiking, hunting, fishing, even golf ought to be thinkable.
    — Los Angeles Times, 22 Apr. 2020
  • That has made the once unthinkable suddenly all too thinkable.
    — Erin Grace, The Seattle Times, 27 Jan. 2018
  • The Girl From Plainville not only humanizes the characters at its center but brings you into the headspace that made such unthinkable actions feel thinkable.
    — Daniel Fienberg, The Hollywood Reporter, 17 May 2022
  • The Girl From Plainville not only humanizes the characters at its center but brings you into the headspace that made such unthinkable actions feel thinkable.
    — Daniel Fienberg, The Hollywood Reporter, 17 May 2022
  • So a couple of advances have happened in recent years that have made this even imaginable, thinkable, to do without animals.
    — James Brown, USA TODAY, 22 Jan. 2023
  • That’s a big but thinkable number, considering Soundcloud receives tens of millions of uploads a year.
    — Alexis C. Madrigal, The Atlantic, 26 Feb. 2020
  • They are designed by the Russians to blur the distinction between conventional and nuclear weapons, which strategists fear makes their use more thinkable.
    — New York Times, 1 June 2022
  • By making nuclear weapons smaller and the targeting more precise, their use becomes more thinkable.
    — Nina Tannenwald, Scientific American, 10 Mar. 2022
  • Hundreds were left dead, villages burned beyond recognition and coexistence among many Rakhines and Rohingyas no longer thinkable.
    — Mary Callahan, Time, 19 May 2015
  • Today, both Russia and the United States have nuclear arms that are much less destructive — their power just fractions of the Hiroshima bomb’s force, their use perhaps less frightening and more thinkable.
    — New York Times, 21 Mar. 2022
  • And what was once thought unthinkable is now unfortunately thinkable.
    — Joe Soucheray, Twin Cities, 23 June 2019
  • In other words, changing a few numbers in Alcubierre’s calculations makes warp at least thinkable in terms of doable technology.
    — David Warmflash, Discover Magazine, 17 Sep. 2014
  • Except Trump’s entire career is beyond the pale, and in his time on the political stage, the unthinkable has become thinkable with regulatory.
    — Jonathan Chait, Daily Intelligencer, 20 July 2017
  • The notion of ending the occupation and allowing a Palestinian state—at the time a taboo prospect in Israeli politics—suddenly became thinkable.
    — Margaret Talbot, The New Yorker, 11 Aug. 2021
  • For 38 harrowing minutes, the unthinkable was thinkable.
    — San Francisco Chronicle, 15 Jan. 2018
  • God’s gifts are all that God bestows upon creation and to all people, regardless of any thinkable hierarchies of deservingness and faithfulness.
    — Samuel Ernest, Longreads, 2 May 2023
  • Both Judaism and Christianity overlap significantly with their Bibles, and are not thinkable without them.
    — John Barton, Time, 14 June 2019
  • The demonstrations have, at times, also boldly called for China to return to the path of political liberalization that seemed at least thinkable, even openly discussable, under Jiang during the 1990s.
    — Chris Buckley, BostonGlobe.com, 30 Nov. 2022
  • Pundits often make this point by citing the Overton window: a concept developed in the 1990s by two libertarian Josephs, Overton and Lehman, to describe the realm of the thinkable for mainstream voters considering policies and platforms.
    — Ian Beacock, The New Republic, 22 Feb. 2022
  • By the time construction began in 2019, the formerly unthinkable notion of shrinking the auditorium had become thinkable.
    — Michael Kimmelman, New York Times, 29 Sep. 2022
  • But clues to a possible path to progress have emerged from the theoretical study of alternate spacetime geometries, thinkable in principle but with unusual properties.
    — Tom Siegfried, Discover Magazine, 6 May 2019
  • The year 1949 opened many fault lines, but unlike that midcentury world, so dramatically described by Peraino in his timely book, our globalized world renders separation not even thinkable.
    — New York Times, 12 Oct. 2017
  • But with a glass or a saucer or ear trumpet, the ordinary qualities of sound waves are magnified, and the possibility for total global surveillance of all conversations from a satellite of our planet becomes thinkable.
    — Justin E. H. Smith, Wired, 3 Mar. 2022

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'thinkable.' 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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