illegibleness
Definition
Noun (uncountable): The quality or state of being illegible; the characteristic of being difficult or impossible to read due to unclear handwriting, print, or design.
Usage Examples
- (The quality of being unreadable.)
- (The state of being difficult to decipher.)
- (The property of being hard to read.)
Advanced Usage
"to overcome illegibleness": to take steps to make text readable.
- The publisher used a high-resolution scanner to overcome the illegibleness of the original print. (To solve the problem of unreadability.)
"inherent illegibleness": a natural or unavoidable lack of clarity.
- The font's elaborate design contributed to its inherent illegibleness for people with poor eyesight. (A fundamental difficulty in reading.)
Variants and Related Words
Illegible (adj): not clear enough to be read.
- His handwriting is so illegible that even he cannot read it. (Difficult to read.)
Illegibly (adv): in a manner that is hard to read.
- She wrote illegibly on the chalkboard, causing the students to squint. (In an unreadable way.)
Legibility (n): the quality of being easy to read (antonym).
- The font's legibility was praised by the design team. (Clarity of text.)
Synonyms
Unreadability: the state of being impossible to read.
- The unreadability of the ancient scroll frustrated the historian. (Similar to illegibleness.)
Indecipherability: the quality of being impossible to understand or interpret.
- The indecipherability of the code required a specialist. (Hard to decode or read.)
Related Idioms
"as clear as mud": not clear at all; very confusing or illegible.
- The instructions were as clear as mud, thanks to the illegibleness of the print. (Extremely unclear.)
"written in chicken scratch": very messy or illegible handwriting.
- Her note was written in chicken scratch, and its illegibleness made it useless. (Sloppy, hard-to-read writing.)