different between colourable vs colourableness

English

Alternative forms

• colorable (American spelling)

Etymology

From colour +? -able.

Pronunciation

• (UK) IPA^(key): /?k?l???b(?)l/

Adjective

colourable (not comparable)

1. (obsolete) Colourful.
2. Apparently true; specious; potentially justifiable.
   • 1612, John Smith, Proceedings of the English Colonie in Virginia, Chapel Hill 1988 (Select Edition of his Writings), p.178:

     they told him their comming was for some extraordinary tooles and shift of apparell; by this colourable excuse, they obtained 6. or 7. more to their confederacie […].
3. (now rare, sometimes law) Deceptive; fake, misleading.
   • 1590, Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, III.iii:

     Glauce, what needs this colourable word, / To cloke the cause, that hath it selfe bewrayd?

   1. (law) In appearance only; not in reality what it purports to be, hence counterfeit, feigned.
4. That can be coloured.
   • 1992, STACS 92, 9th Annual Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Computer Science, edited by A. Finkel and M. Jantzen, page 397:

     A circle graph with no cycle of length four is colourable with three colours.

Usage notes

The sense "that can be coloured" is more common in American than in British English.

Translations

References

• Black's Law Dictionary, Sixth Edition.
• Oxford Dictionaries

English

Etymology

colourable +? -ness

Noun

colourableness (uncountable)

1. The state or quality of being colourable.