Inaccessible

How to spell inaccessible

12 letters · 5 syllables

How to pronounce inaccessible

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does inaccessible mean?

1. adjectiveImpossible or very difficult to reach, enter, use, or obtain.

Inaccessible in a sentence

• The mountain village was completely inaccessible during the winter snows.

• The archived files are inaccessible without the correct password.

Where does inaccessible come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin inaccessibilis, meaning 'that cannot be approached or reached'. It was built from the negative prefix in- ('not') attached to accessibilis, which in turn grew from the verb accedere, 'to approach' or 'to come near'. That verb combines ad- ('to, toward') with cedere, meaning 'to go' or 'to move', the same root that gives us 'proceed', 'recede', and 'access'. English took the word in the fifteenth century, partly through Old French and partly straight from Latin, and the modern sense of a place, person, or idea being out of reach grew directly from the literal Latin notion of somewhere you simply could not walk up to. The spelling trap lives in that buried Latin structure: the doubled c comes from ac- meeting the c of cess, the doubled s belongs to cess itself, and the ending is -ible rather than -able because the word descends from a Latin -ibilis form.

How the word is built

• in- (not)
• ac- (to, from Latin ad-)
• cess (from cedere: to go, move)
• -ible (able to be)