M. R. Cohen
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Commensurable means "having a common measure" or "corresponding in size, extent, amount, or degree." Its antonym incommensurable generally refers to things that are unlike and incompatible, sharing no common ground ("incommensurable theories"), or to things that are very disproportionate, often to the point of defying comparison ("incommensurable crimes"). Both words entered English in the 1500s and were originally used (as they still can be) for numbers that have or don't have a common divisor. They came to English by way of Middle French and Late Latin, ultimately deriving from the Latin noun mensura, meaning "measure." Mensura is also an ancestor of commensurate (meaning "coextensive" or "proportionate") and incommensurate ("disproportionate" or "insufficient"), which overlap in meaning with commensurable and incommensurable but are not exact synonyms.
Examples of incommensurable in a Sentence
Literary Hub, 18 May 2026
But the painterly resources available to Raphael were vastly larger than those available to an artist a scant half century before, as the musical and lyrical resources available to a pop musician in 1970 were incommensurable with those available to a pop musician in 1960.
—Adam Gopnik, New Yorker, 28 July 2025
After 15 months of fighting, the IDF’s losses are incommensurable with Hamas’s.
—Hussein Ibish, The Atlantic, 19 Jan. 2025
In Sewing Machine, 2000, the mechanism’s operator—this time male—seems not to be sewing at all, but conducting some kind of shamanistic ritual that sends the other figures populating the painting’s hallucinatory space into their own incommensurable realms of reverie.
—Barry Schwabsky, Artforum, 1 Jan. 2025
If human values are incommensurable and sometimes flat-out incompatible, that means no single political arrangement can satisfy all legitimate human values simultaneously.
—Sigal Samuel, Vox, 7 Dec. 2018
Cite this Entry
“Incommensurable.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/incommensurable. Accessed 13 Jun. 2026.
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