- 1可笑的、荒謬的（是嘲笑，不是好笑）
If something is laughable, it is so bad, so silly, or so wrong that you cannot take it seriously. The key thing: this is not warm laughter. A funny joke is not laughable — a funny joke is funny. Laughable is what you say about the excuse that nobody believes, the offer that is far too low, the safety plan that would protect nobody. It means "this is a joke", and it is an insult. So people mostly use it about things: a laughable excuse, a laughable amount of money, a laughable attempt. You can also say a person's behaviour or an argument is laughable, which is strong criticism. There is a second, older and softer use where laughable simply means "causing laughter", but that use is rare now, and if you use the word today people will hear the critical meaning. It feels a bit formal or written — in speech people are more likely to say "that's ridiculous" or "that's a joke".
組成laugh + -able. The -able ending here means "able to be laughed at", like readable (able to be read). The verb laugh goes back through Middle English laughen to Old English hlæhhan and further back to a Germanic word that imitated the sound of laughing. The -able ending came into English from Old French, from Latin -ābilis.
原始詞典資料2 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，摘錄並精簡格式，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
laughableadj/ˈlaːfəbl̩/
- 1
archaicFitted to excite laughter; humorous.
- At this our first dinner at the Government House a very laughable incident occurred.
- 2
Worthless; worthy of contempt or derision.
- It would be difficult, for example, to imagine a bigger, more obvious subject for comedy than the laughable self-delusion of washed-up celebrities, especially if the washed-up celebrity in question is Adam West, a camp icon who can go toe to toe with William Shatner as the king of winking self-parody.
- “Maybe it made them feel better about their lives that a young prince’s life was laughable. Never mind that my mother didn’t meet Major Hewitt until long after I was born,” he wrote.
摘錄自 英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary，已精簡格式；依 CC BY-SA 4.0 授權使用，改動後的內容同樣以此授權提供。