Talk:impregnable

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impregnable

2nd sense, "not able to get pregnant". It's hard to research this since the 1st sense is overwhelmingly more common. However, searching the usual archives for "pregnant impregnable" (without quotation marks), gave some evidence that, on the contrary, the word has an obscure sense, "ABLE to get pregnant", ie, the opposite of what we have. But I didn't research it long, so...  :) Language Lover 18:22, 8 April 2007 (UTC)

• No, he means inconceivable! But seriously, there is a verb impregn (meaning impregnate) from which this would mean "able to be impregnated". SemperBlotto 18:44, 8 April 2007 (UTC)

Searching through the first few pages of b.g.c. hits for pregnancy impregnable, I get a few that seem to be "able to get pregnant" (most clearly http://books.google.com/books?id=J34gAAAAMAAJ&q=impregnable&pgis=1), but also a few that seem to be the reverse (e.g. http://books.google.com/books?id=U18QAAAAIAAJ&q=impregnable&pgis=1, though I'm really not sure about this one). Both uses seem to be incredibly rare, though; even pairing the word with "pregnancy" mostly pulls up hits in the normal sense (which, incidentally, is the only sense the OED gives). —Ruakh_TALK 21:26, 8 April 2007 (UTC)

RFV failed. Sense removed. —Ruakh_TALK 16:02, 19 June 2007 (UTC)

Unnecessary duplication?

If impregnable is an adjective in both senses, and the morphology in both senses is identical, shouldn't those things occur at a higher level in the entry structure than the etymology, definition, and examples, which differ? It doesn't make sense to duplicate the part of speech and forms of the word under each heading. As far as I know, the hierarchy shown in the help topic is only a suggested order, and individual entries may differ for valid reasons. Avoiding a clumsy entry structure would seem to be a valid reason. P Aculeius (talk) 03:18, 18 September 2012 (UTC)

I think the idea is that they're not technically the same word, they're just two words that happen to be spelled the same. It follows the format of pages where two words are spelled the same but are /not/ the same part of speech, e.g. "lead". Soap (talk) 05:19, 18 July 2014 (UTC)