- 1
Easy to control, handle, or deal with. It works two ways. Of a person or animal: willing to be led, not stubborn — a tractable child, a tractable horse. Of a thing: workable — a tractable problem, a tractable material that bends the way you want it to. The picture underneath the word is physical: something you can get your hands on and manage. It is formal and mostly written; in speech a student would say 'easy to deal with' or, about a person, 'cooperative' or 'obedient'. Two honest notes. Used of people it often carries a slight edge — the speaker is looking down from above, weighing how easy someone is to manage, so it can sound patronising even when it's meant as praise. And in maths, computing and science it has a firm technical sense: a tractable problem is one that can actually be solved or computed within reasonable limits. You will meet the negative 'intractable' far more often than this word itself.
溫順的、聽話的；（問題）容易處理的、（數學）可解的
組成Latin tractābilis 'that can be touched, handled, managed', from tractō 'handle, manage', a repeated-action form of trahō 'draw, pull'. So literally: 'handleable'. The English ending -able carries the same 'can be ...ed' sense.
同家族的字
- intractablein- 'not' + tractable — the far commoner opposite
- tractabilitythe noun — the quality of being tractable
- tractorsame Latin trahō 'pull'
- contractLatin con- 'together' + trahō 'pull' — pull together
- subtractLatin sub- 'away' + trahō 'pull' — pull away
原始詞典資料6 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，原文照列，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。
tractableadj/ˈtɹæk.tə.bəl/
- 1
Capable of being easily led, taught, or managed.
- "Tess is queer." "But she's tractable at bottom. Leave her to me."
- But once in London Jane Porter was no more tractable than she had been in Baltimore. She found one excuse after another, […]
- 2
Easy to deal with or manage.
- I have always found horses, an animal I am attached to, very tractable when treated with humanity and steadiness.
- Of all the tractable, equal-tempered, attached, and faithful beings that ever lived, I believe he was the most so.
- 3
Capable of being shaped; malleable.
- I need not point out the advantages of modelling in a material as durable as stone. . . . Mixed up with just enough water to form a stiff paste, it accommodates itself to the touch of the modelling tool. . . . There are two inherent difficulties in using it—one, it is not so tractable as clay. . . .
- 4
obsoleteCapable of being handled or touched.
- At leaſt five Hundred of theſe reforming Vultures are daily plundering our Pockets, and ranſacking our Houſes, leaving me ſometimes not one pair of Tractable Buttocks in my Vaulting-School to provide for my Family, or earn me ſo much as a Pudding for my next Sundays Dinner : [...]
- 5
mathematicssciencesSufficiently operationalizable or useful to allow a mathematical calculation to proceed toward a solution.
- This assumption is in the Raiffa and Schlaifer (1961, p. 72) spirit of using ‘a little ingenuity. . . to find a tractable function’ to quantify risk-preferences and probability judgments so as to make the analysis feasible.
- 6
computercomputingengineeringAlgorithmically solvable fast enough to be practically relevant, typically in polynomial time.
資料來源：英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary（CC BY-SA 4.0）。 原文照列，未經改寫。