Weekly Word: Incontrovertible

Here’s a long adjective with a short definition: incontrovertible means “not open to question”, “indisputable”, “impossible to deny”, or, phrased another way, “necessarily or demonstrably true”. I prefer any of those definitions over “not controvertible”. Why does Dictionary.com even bother including that?

Anyway, as you can probably guess, this word is related to controversy, which comes from Latin contra-, meaning “against”, and versus, meaning “to turn”. And apparently there’s even a verb controvert, meaning “to argue against”. I’ve never seen it before, but a quick search reveals that it does show up in recent news articles.

I thought I’d come up with a clever little sentence that uses all these similar words together, but others already have, as in “controvert the incontrovertible”. I liked this phrase from somebody’s academic retort (about I don’t know what): “I say that the evidence was incontrovertible because you did not try to controvert it.”