Irreconcilable

adj, noun, slang

adj, noun, slang ·6 syllables ·Common ·High school level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    Something that cannot be reconciled.
  2. 2
    A Confederate who moved to another country following the American Civil War, rather than live in a reunited United States. US, dated, slang
  3. 3
    A vociferous opponent of the Treaty of Versailles. US, dated, slang
Adjective
  1. 1
    Unable to be reconciled; opposed; uncompromising.

    "[T]he fact that the peccant doctor [Sir James Clark, 1st Baronet] continued in the Queen's service made the Hastings family irreconcilable and produced an unpleasant impression of unrepentant error upon the public mind."

  2. 2
    Incompatible, discrepant, contradictory.

    "I amused myself by thinking that in his choice of books he showed pleasantly the irreconcilable sides of his fantastic nature."

Adjective
  1. 1
    impossible to reconcile wordnet

Synonyms

All synonyms
inconsistenthostileabnormalabsurdadamantadamantine

Example

More examples

"Chokichi keenly felt that people, as they get older, forget entirely about the worries that only young people know about and that they themselves experienced in their youth; and that they nonchalantly take this convenient disposition where they judge harshly the circumstances of the young persons born of the next generation. He felt that there was truly an irreconcilable gap between the old and the young."

Etymology

Borrowed from Middle French irréconciliable, from Late Latin irreconciliābilis, from in- (“not”) + reconciliō (“I reconcile”) + -ābilis (“-able”). By surface analysis, ir- + reconcilable.

Related phrases

irreconcilable differencesamerican civil warunited states

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.