Unstoppable

How to spell unstoppable

11 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce unstoppable

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does unstoppable mean?

1. adjectiveImpossible to stop, prevent, or hold back.

Unstoppable in a sentence

• Once the deadline passed, the merger felt unstoppable and the staff began to plan around it.

• With three goals in the first half, the home team looked unstoppable.

Where does unstoppable come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a transparent English compound built on three layers. The core is 'stop', which goes back to the Old English stoppian, meaning 'to block up' or 'to plug', a word that originally described stuffing or sealing a hole rather than halting motion; the modern 'bring to a halt' sense developed only gradually. Wrapped around it is the prefix 'un-', the native Germanic negative that simply means 'not', and the suffix '-able', which came into English from Latin -abilis (by way of French) and means 'capable of being'. Put together, 'unstoppable' literally says 'not able to be stopped', and it is a comparatively modern formation, appearing in English around the early nineteenth century. The spelling trap lives in the middle: because 'stop' ends in a single vowel followed by a single consonant, the 'p' doubles before '-able', giving 'stoppable' and therefore 'unstoppable', not 'unstopable'.

How the word is built

• un- (not)
• stop (Old English stoppian: to block or halt)
• doubled p
• -able (capable of being)