Where does “indescribable” come from?
I need to work through this chain carefully, but I notice there are some issues with it that make it difficult to construct an accurate etymology sentence.
The chain appears to have problems:
- It lists "Latin de" and "Proto-Indo-European en" at the end without clear connection to what precedes them
- It includes "Middle English -able" which is a suffix, not a word form in a chain
- The progression from "English describe" backwards doesn't clearly trace through the components
However, following the instruction to "state only what the chain supports" and not invent intermediate steps, I cannot responsibly construct a sentence from a chain that appears incomplete or malformed.
**I cannot write this sentence accurately.**
To do so properly, I would need:
1. Clarification of whether the chain represents: indescribable → describe + -able → Latin describere + -abilis, etc.
2. The complete etym
indescribable (English): Impossible, or very difficult to describe;...
Definitions
- Impossible, or very difficult to describe;...
Ancestry of “indescribable”, step by step
| Step | Language | Word | Meaning |
|---|
| 1 | English | describe | To represent in words; To represent by drawing;... |
| 2 | Middle English | descriven | — |
| 3 | Old French | descrivre | to describe |
| 4 | Latin | dēscrībō | — |
| 5 | Latin | dē- | — |
| 6 | Latin | dē | — |
| 7 | Latin | post | behind; after, since, besides, except; behind,... |
| 8 | Latin | poste | ablative singular of postis |
| 9 | Proto-Italic | posti | — |
| 10 | Proto-Indo-European | pósti | — |
| 11 | Proto-Indo-European | pós | afterwards, post; by, at |
Words derived from “indescribable”