gradableadj.

1881 St. Louis (Missouri) Globe-Democrat 31 May 9/4 Everything fairly gradable as shipping cattle sold out at satisfactory prices.

1901 W. H. Frazier Testing Fire Risks for Rates i. 43 It requires a more practiced insurance eye..to discern a gradeable difference between the great body of medium risks and the next lower quality..than is required to separate any other two contiguous qualities.

1953 P. S. Florence Logic Brit. & Amer. Industry i. ii. 11 The degree of mechanization is itself determined by the physical nature of materials (e.g. greater where materials are uniform and gradable) and by the nature of the work.

2002 B. Rockefeller Global Trader iv. 123 [For a commodity to qualify for futures trading] it has to be standardizable, gradable, and of limited perishability.

1937 W. E. Collinson Indication (Language Monograph No. 17) x. 77 In comparisons of gradable qualities we use as + adj. + as, e.g. ‘as black as jet’.

1944 Philos. Sci. 11 115 The superlative implication of ‘perfect’, which should make of it a unique and ungradable term, tends to be lost sight of for the simple reason that it belongs to the class of essentially gradable terms (e.g. ‘good’).

1963 J. Lyons Struct. Semantics iv. 62 These are the gradable antonyms. Grading is bound up with comparison.

1993 M. A. Jones Sardinian Syntax iv. 170 With adjectives and adverbs denoting gradable qualities, they [sc. degree adverbs] express the degree of the quality.

2002 H. Jackson Lexicography i. 4 An alternative way of expressing comparison, applied..to nearly all gradable adjectives of three syllables or more, is with the adverbs more and most.