illegibility

English

Noun

illegibility (countable and uncountable, plural illegibilities)

1. The characteristic or quality of being illegible; the quality of being difficult or impossible to read.

   The illegibility of his handwriting made it unclear which answer he wrote.

   • 1847 January – 1848 July, William Makepeace Thackeray, “chapter 15”, in Vanity Fair […], London: Bradbury and Evans […], published 1848, →OCLC:

     “Poor thing! poor thing!” says Briggs (who was thinking of twenty-four years back, and that hectic young writing-master whose lock of yellow hair, and whose letters, beautiful in their illegibility, she cherished in her old desk upstairs).

   • 1937, Kenneth Gandar-Dower, chapter 4, in The Spotted Lion, page 144:

     I passed the time by adding to the illegibilities in my diary.

   • 1961, V. S. Naipaul, A House for Mr Biswas, Vintage International, published 2001, Part One, Chapter 4:

     And on the back endpaper of the Collins Clear-Type Shakespeare, a work of fatiguing illegibility, he wrote the names in large letters, as though his succession had already been settled.

Antonyms

• legibility

Translations

the quality of being illegible; the quality of being difficult or impossible to read

• Bulgarian: нечетливост f (nečetlivost)
• German: Unlesbarkeit f
• Hungarian: olvashatatlanság
• Portuguese: ilegibilidade f
• Russian: нечита́емость f (nečitájemostʹ)
• Turkish: okunaksızlık