- 1遙不可及的、無法達成的
Not possible to reach or get, no matter how hard you try. It is used for goals, standards, dreams, and levels — things you aim at rather than things you hold. A salary can be unattainable, a perfect score can be unattainable, a dream can be unattainable. It is a formal word; in ordinary talk people say 'you'll never get it' or 'that's out of reach'. There are two flavours of it. Sometimes it is a plain statement of fact: the target is set so high that no one could meet it. Sometimes it carries sadness or criticism — 'unattainable beauty standards' means standards nobody could ever meet, and the speaker thinks it is wrong to set them. That second use is very common now in writing about magazines, social media, and body image. Note that 'unattainable' is about reaching upward toward something desirable. You would not say a bad thing is unattainable, even though it is technically 'not achievable'.
組成un- ('not') + attain ('to reach, to succeed in getting') + -able ('able to be'). Read it backwards: able-to-be-reached, then 'not'. 'Attain' itself came through Old French from Latin attingere, 'to touch on, to reach' — so the picture underneath is a hand stretching out and just failing to touch.
同家族的字
- attainthe verb inside it — to succeed in reaching something after effort
- attainmentsame root, noun form — something you have reached or achieved
- obtainableshares -able; the pattern un- + verb + -able builds many words like this
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。
unattainableadj/ˌʌnəˈteɪnəbəl/
- 1
Impossible to attain or reach; unable to accomplish
- Efficiency for the sake of efficiency, unchallenged authority conferred upon those who know well a few things and ignore everything else, disdain for the ordinary and humble elements that introduce happiness in our lives, worship of unattainable utopiae, are some of the features of the scheme which leads inevitably to the suppression of the eternal gifts bestowed by God upon every human person and to the frightful prospect of being ruled by what he vividly names “the Empire of the Insect.”
unattainablenoun/ˌʌnəˈteɪnəbəl/
- 1
Anything that cannot be attained.
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。