WORD OF THE DAY: INSCRUTABLE
adjective
in-SKROO-tuh-bul
WHAT IT MEANS
Inscrutable means “not readily investigated, interpreted, or understood.” It often describes things that are mysterious or difficult to comprehend.
// His professor wore an inscrutable expression throughout the oral exam.
INSCRUTABLE IN CONTEXT
“The paper makes significant progress on an unresolved aspect of the inscrutable math equation that determines how the primes are distributed along the number line.” — Joseph Howlett, Scientific American, 12 Aug. 2026
DID YOU KNOW?
Scrutinising the inscrutable may be futile: even close scrutiny can fail to decipher it. Scrutinising 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, scrutinise, 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.
Merriam Webster Dictionary
