incommensurable
adjective
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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.
Example Sentences
Richard Brody, The New Yorker, 10 Aug. 2022 The progression suggests that one way fiction might approach the depiction of capitalist totality and its impossible forms is by presenting it, however futilely, through incommensurable shards. Jane Hu, The Atlantic, 26 May 2022 This meant that the sacred and the profane lived cheek by jowl—intimately connected and yet incommensurable with each other. Peter Brown, The New York Review of Books, 24 Sep. 2020 This was inimical to long-term functional currency status just as over-abundant incommensurable dialects and over-frequent meaning-changes would be inimical to a functional lingua franca. Robert Hockett, Forbes, 28 June 2021 Children are both sources of incommensurable joy and inefficient engines of need; careers, particularly athletic careers, can also be capricious and make uncompromising demands. Louisa Thomas, The New Yorker, 18 Feb. 2020 Word History
1570, in the meaning defined above