Meaning & use
unmanageability
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Meaning
noununcountable
The quality of being too large, wild or complicated for anyone to control or deal with successfully.
Grammar: No plural: the unmanageability of the project, not unmanageabilities.
Patterns
- the unmanageability of something
The unmanageability of the old filing system finally convinced the office to go digital.
Parents often complain about the unmanageability of their children at the end of a long holiday.
Developers worried about the unmanageability of a codebase with no documentation.
Common combinations
- the unmanageability of a situation
- Nobody could ignore the unmanageability of the situation any longer.
- growing unmanageability
- The growing unmanageability of the crowd forced officials to close the gates.
- sheer unmanageability
- The sheer unmanageability of her inbox made her declare email bankruptcy.
- cite unmanageability
- The council cited unmanageability as the reason for splitting the department.
Synonyms and how they differ
- uncontrollability
- Uncontrollability focuses on lack of control, often of behavior or emotions, rather than on size or complexity.
- unwieldiness
- Unwieldiness stresses that something is awkward because of its size or shape, not that it is out of control.
- intractability
- Intractability is more formal and suggests a problem or person that stubbornly resists solutions.
Opposites
Word family
- manage verb
- to handle or control
- manageable adjective
- able to be handled
- unmanageable adjective
- impossible to handle
- manageability noun
- the quality of being easy to handle
Commonly confused: unmanageability or unmanageable?
unmanageability vs unmanageable
Unmanageable is the adjective describing the thing; unmanageability is the noun naming the quality.
Practice
The report warned about the ______ of the growing waiting list.
Choose one answer.
After 'the' and before 'of' a noun is needed, so unmanageability fits; the other options are adjectives or an adverb.
Make it your own
Write a sentence using “unmanageability”, then check it and compare it with the examples above.