Adjective – Insuperable
Let’s start with the word “super.” It comes straight from Latin, where it means “over” or “above.”
Next, turn “super” into a verb: “superate.” Yes, it’s a real verb, but it’s rare. To superate things is to rise above them: to overcome them, to beat them, or to exceed them.
That takes us to “superable,” meaning “able to be overcome: able to be beaten, able to be exceeded.” Again, “superable” is a real word, but it’s rare.
Much more common is the opposite word, “insuperable.” Insuperable things are so high, so huge, or so good that they can’t be overcome, beaten, or exceeded.
Part of speech:
adjective: “the other team’s insuperable advantages,” “their close-minded attitude is insuperable“
Other forms:
insuperably, insuperability
how to use it:
Use this strong, dramatic word for emphasis. It’s a fresh alternative to more common synonyms like “unbeatable” and “impossible.”
If you can imagine something being so big or so tall that, figuratively, you can’t climb over it, you can call it insuperable.
So, talk about insuperable limits, barriers, and obstacles; insuperable differences and distances; and insuperable problems and difficulties.
You can also refer to people’s dislikes, objections, unwillingness, close-mindedness and so on as insuperable, meaning there’s just no getting past them.
examples:
“Skeptics say [China] faces insuperable hurdles, including an education system that emphasizes memorization over original thinking.”
— Eva Dou, Wall Street Journal, 6 December 2016
“To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd. Yet…the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly be considered real.”
— Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 1859