different between misleading vs colourable

English

Etymology

mislead +? -ing

Pronunciation

• Rhymes: -i?d??

Adjective

misleading (comparative more misleading, superlative most misleading)

1. Deceptive or tending to mislead or create a false impression, even if technically true.

Synonyms

• mistakable
• confusing

Derived terms

• misleadingly
• unmisleading

Translations

Verb

misleading

1. present participle of mislead

Noun

misleading (plural misleadings)

1. A deception that misleads.
   • 2012, Jennifer Mather Saul, Lying, Misleading, and What is Said (page 70)

     According to this tradition, acts of deception that are mere misleadings are morally better than acts of deception that are lies.

Anagrams

• misaligned, misdealing

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