Word of the Day

: January 26, 2008

immutable

adjective ih-MYOO-tuh-bul

What It Means

: not capable of or susceptible to change

immutable in Context

"Emboldened local farmers, whose diets had for the past 200 years been nearly as immutable as those of their horses, began to drift over to the sushi bar to see what . . . was going on." (William Hamilton, Gourmet, October 2003)

Did You Know?

"Immutable" comes to us through Middle English from Latin "immutabilis," meaning "unable to change." "Immutabilis" was formed by combining the negative prefix "in-" with "mutabilis," which comes from the Latin verb "mutare" and means "to change." Some other English words that can be traced back to "mutare" are "commute" (the earliest sense of which is simply "to change or alter"), "mutate" ("to undergo significant and basic alteration"), "permute" ("to change the order or arrangement of"), and "transmute" ("to change or alter in form, appearance, or nature"). There's also the antonym of "immutable" -- "mutable" -- which of course can mean "prone to change" and "capable of change or of being changed."