Word of the Day Archive
Tuesday February 17, 2004
tractable \TRAK-tuh-buhl\ , adjective:
1. Capable of being easily led, taught, or managed; docile.
2. Easily handled, managed, or worked; malleable.
I have always found horses, an animal I am attached to, very tractable when treated with humanity and steadiness.
-- Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
He thought that our temperaments are at least partly innate: "Some men by unalterable frame of their constitution are stout, others timorous, some confident, others modest and tractable."
-- Jonathan Weiner, Time, Love, Memory
Alice gets out her calculator and begins solving what, for her, is a far more tractable kind of problem.
-- Stephen S. Hall, "The Smart Set", New York Times Magazine, June 4, 2000
Tractable derives from Latin tractabilis, from tractare, to handle, to manage, frequentative of traho, to draw, to drag.
Dictionary.com Entry and Pronunciation for tractable
