Word of the Day

: September 8, 2020

impregnable

adjective im-PREG-nuh-bul

What It Means

1 : incapable of being taken by assault : unconquerable

2 : unassailable; also : impenetrable

impregnable in Context

"The castle was built on the corner of a great rock, so that on three sides it was quite impregnable…." — Bram Stoker, Dracula, 1897

"In his first months at Kryptos Logic, Hutchins got inside one massive botnet after another…. Even when his new colleagues at Kryptos believed that a botnet was impregnable, Hutchins would surprise them by coming up with a fresh sample of the bot's code…." — Andrew Greenberg, Wired, 12 May 2020

Did You Know?

Impregnable is one of the many English words that bear a French ancestry, thanks to the Norman conquest of England in 1066. It derives from the Middle French verb prendre, which means "to take or capture." Combining prendre with various prefixes has given our language many other words, too, including surprise, reprise, and enterprise. Remarkably, impregnable has a different origin from the similar-looking word pregnant; that word comes from a different Latin word, praegnas, meaning "carrying a fetus."