Meaning & use
doable
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Meanings
adjectivecomparableinformal
Possible to do with the time, skill or money you have.
Grammar: Used after be or seem: the plan is doable.
Patterns
- be doable
- seem doable
Finishing the report by Friday sounds doable.
The hike is long but doable for beginners.
With enough help, the project is doable.
adjectivecomparableinformal
Not too hard or demanding, so you feel able to attempt it.
Grammar: Often follows a sense like pretty or perfectly: pretty doable.
Patterns
- perfectly doable
- pretty doable
The recipe looked complicated but was actually pretty doable.
A ten-minute workout every day is perfectly doable.
The deadline was tight, yet still doable.
Word forms
| comparative | more doable |
|---|---|
| superlative | most doable |
Common combinations
- perfectly doable
- The trip is perfectly doable in a weekend.
- seem doable
- The budget seems doable.
- totally doable
- Moving next month is totally doable.
- doable in a day
- The repairs are doable in a day.
- still doable
- It is late, but the plan is still doable.
Synonyms and how they differ
- feasible
- Feasible is more formal and typically used in plans, reports and business.
- achievable
- Achievable suggests a goal you can reach, often after effort.
- manageable
- Manageable stresses that a burden is small enough to cope with.
- practicable
- Practicable is formal and suggests something workable in real conditions.
Opposites
Word family
Commonly confused: doable or undoable?
doable vs undoable
Undoable can mean impossible to do, which looks like the opposite of doable, but it can also mean impossible to reverse.
Practice
The deadline is tight, but with three of us working, it's ___.
Choose one answer.
Doable means possible to achieve. Undone means not finished, and the other options do not fit grammatically or in meaning.
Make it your own
Write a sentence using “doable”, then check it and compare it with the examples above.