Indistinguishable

How to spell indistinguishable

17 letters · 6 syllables

How to pronounce indistinguishable

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does indistinguishable mean?

1. adjectiveSo similar to something else that the two cannot be told apart.

Indistinguishable in a sentence

• The forged document was virtually indistinguishable from the original.

• The twins were indistinguishable to everyone except their parents.

Where does indistinguishable come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb distinguere, meaning 'to mark off' or 'to separate', which itself combined dis- 'apart' with a root -stinguere connected to pricking or marking. The English verb 'distinguish' arrived through Old French distinguer in the late 1300s, picking up the -ish ending common to such borrowed verbs. Adding the negative prefix in- 'not' and the suffix -able 'capable of being' produced 'indistinguishable', literally 'not able to be told apart', which appears in English from around the 1600s. The same Latin family gave us 'extinguish' and 'distinct', all sharing that idea of marking or separating one thing from another. The spelling trap lies hidden in the silent stretch -stingu-, where the 'gu' is sounded as 'gw' and the long chain of unstressed syllables makes it easy to drop a letter or misplace the doubled consonants.

How the word is built

• in- (not)
• dis- (apart)
• tingu (from Latin -stinguere: to mark off, separate)
• -ish (verb-forming, via French)
• -able (capable of being)