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Unutterably is the adverb of unutterable. It goes in front of an adjective and means "so much that words cannot say it" — in practice, an extremely strong "extremely". Unutterably sad, unutterably beautiful, unutterably tired. The grammar difference matters. Unutterable sits before a noun (unutterable sadness); unutterably sits before an adjective (unutterably sad). Same feeling, different shape of sentence. Like its parent word, this is literary and quite old-fashioned. It belongs in novels, reviews, and writing that wants to sound grand. A young student writing an email should reach for "incredibly" or "unbelievably" instead. But it is worth recognising when you read, because writers use it at the emotional high point of a paragraph — when it appears, something important is happening. One small thing that surprises : because it is so strong, it is often used with a touch of humour, on purpose stretched over something small. "The meeting was unutterably boring." Nobody thinks the was truly beyond language. The oversized word IS the joke.
無法形容地、說不出地(極其……;文學或誇張語氣)
組成unutterable + -ly. The -ly ending is how English turns most adjectives into adverbs: quick → quickly, sad → sadly.
同家族的字
- unutterablethe adjective this adverb is built from
- utterthe verb at the root — to say out loud
- unspeakablysame meaning, built from speak
原始詞典資料1 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。
unutterablyadv
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In an unutterable manner; inexpressibly; so bad or otherwise extreme that one cannot talk about it.
- We both of us went on our knees, and, feeling unutterably sad, a whispered prayer went up from our lips as the poor fellow's soul flitted away to a happier and brighter world, and all was over.
- I turned away and left her to finish her journey in peace, feeling, but only for a moment or two, that I had been an unutterably mean hound.
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。