You Can Believe This History of Plausible

Today the word plausible usually means "reasonable" or "believable," but it once held the meanings "worthy of being applauded" and "approving." It comes to us from the Latin adjective plausibilis ("worthy of applause"), which in turn derives from the verb plaudere, meaning "to applaud or clap." Other "plaudere" descendants in English include "applaud," "plaudit" (the earliest meaning of which was "a round of applause"), and "explode" (from Latin explodere, meaning "to drive off the stage by clapping).

Examples of plausible in a Sentence

In our solar system, the biggest moon is Jupiter's Ganymede, which has a mass only 2.5 percent that of Earth—too small to easily hang on to an Earth-like atmosphere. But I realized that there are plausible ways for moons approaching the mass of Earth to form in other planetary systems, potentially around giant planets within their stars' habitable zones, where such moons could have atmospheres similar to our own planet. — René Heller, Scientific American, January 2015 I watch the ospreys who nest on Perch Island high atop their white spruce. Our sense of a plausible summer depends much on their diligent success at nest-building and procreation, and on their chicks fledging in late August. — Richard Ford, Wall Street Journal, 14-15 June 2008 … I'd mastered the quick size-up. Does the person seem agreeable over coffee at the drugstore counter and picking up his mail at the post office, drive a plausible vehicle, and know the weather forecast? — Edward Hoagland, Harper's, June 2007 … string theorists can exhibit plausible models of a unified Universe, but unfortunately they cannot explain why we inhabit a particular one. — Michael Atiyah, Nature, 22-29 Dec. 2005 it's a plausible explanation for the demise of that prehistoric species

Recent Examples on the Web That normalization is worth far more than any plausible prizes. — Mike Bird, WSJ, 3 June 2021 Her teachers might say that isn’t a plausible goal. — Los Angeles Times, 2 June 2021 That’s because the other plausible theory of transmission, that the novel coronavirus was accidentally leaked from a lab, was the position backed by former President Donald Trump, and, as a result, many of his followers. — Elizabeth Yuko, Rolling Stone, 1 June 2021 Kyle Garlick filled in Monday, but the only other plausible outfielder on the bench was Willians Astudillo. — Phil Miller, Star Tribune, 31 May 2021 Figs achieved profitability in both 2019 and 2020 and has a plausible path to justify the expectations baked into the stock price if the firm can: maintain current margins and maintain above average revenue growth rates. — David Trainer, Forbes, 27 May 2021 And those gangs give those governments the shield of plausible deniability. — Sue Halpern, The New Yorker, 19 May 2021 Even so, before the lines of class war get hopelessly tangled, the carnage feels loosely plausible on an allegorical level. — Jessica Kiang, Rolling Stone, 26 May 2021 Moghimi says that researchers already understood this potential risk in theory, but that the Google findings, once again, demonstrate a plausible, real-world attack. — Lily Hay Newman, Wired, 26 May 2021

These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'plausible.' Views expressed in the examples do not represent the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.