different between obdurate vs unsusceptible

English

Etymology

Mid-15th century, from Latin obduratus (“hardened”), form of obd?r? (“harden”), from ob- (“against”) + d?r? (“harden, render hard”), from durus (“hard”). Compare durable, endure.

Pronunciation

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /??bd????t/, /??bdj???t/, /??bd????t/, /-?t/
• (General American) IPA^(key): /??bd(j)???t/, /??bd(j)???t/, /-?t/
• Sometimes accented on the second syllable, especially by the older poets.

Adjective

obdurate (comparative more obdurate, superlative most obdurate)

1. Stubbornly persistent, generally in wrongdoing; refusing to reform or repent.
   • 1593, Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Book I:

     ... sometimes the very custom of evil making the heart obdurate against whatsoever instructions to the contrary ...

   • 1591, William Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part 3, Act I, sc. 4:

     Art thou obdurate, flinty, hard as steel,

     Nay, more than flint, for stone at rain relenteth?

   • 1674, John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book I, lines 56–8

     ... round he throws his baleful eyes

     That witness'd huge affliction and dismay

     Mixt with obdurate pride and stedfast hate:

   • 1818, Percy Bysshe Shelley,"The Revolt of Islam", canto 4, stanza 9, lines 1486-7:

     But custom maketh blind and obdurate

     The loftiest hearts.
2. (obsolete) Physically hardened, toughened.
3. Hardened against feeling; hard-hearted.
   • 1848, William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair, Chapter 13:

     I fear the gentleman to whom Miss Amelia's letters were addressed was rather an obdurate critic.

Synonyms

• (stubbornly persistent in wrongdoing): hardened, hard-hearted, impertinent, intractable, unrepentant, unyielding, recalcitrant

Derived terms

• obduracy

Related terms

• durable, duration
• endure, endurance, enduring

Translations

Verb

obdurate (third-person singular simple present obdurates, present participle obdurating, simple past and past participle obdurated)

1. (transitive, obsolete) To harden; to obdure.

References

Anagrams

• taboured

Latin

Verb

obd?r?te

1. second-person plural present active imperative of obd?r?

English

Etymology

un- +? susceptible

Adjective

unsusceptible (comparative more unsusceptible, superlative most unsusceptible)

1. Not susceptible.
   • 1751, Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, 28 May, 1751, in Frank Brady and W. K. Wimsatt (eds.) Samuel Johnson: Selected Poetry and Prose, Berkeley: University of California Press, p. 202,^[1]

     Imagination, a licentious and vagrant faculty, unsusceptible of limitations, and impatient of restraint, has always endeavored to baffle the logician, to perplex the confines of distinction, and burst the enclosures of regularity.

   • 1817, William Wordsworth, “Vernal Ode,” Stanza III,^[2]

     Mortals, rejoice! the very Angels quit

     Their mansions unsusceptible of change,

     Amid your pleasant bowers to sit,

     And through your sweet vicissitudes to range!

   • 1818, Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, Chapter ,^[3]

     It would be mortifying to the feelings of many ladies, could they be made to understand how little the heart of man is affected by what is costly or new in their attire; how little it is biased by the texture of their muslin, and how unsusceptible of peculiar tenderness towards the spotted, the sprigged, the mull, or the jackonet.

   • 1873, John Stuart Mill, Autobiography, Chapter 5,^[4]

     I was in a dull state of nerves, such as everybody is occasionally liable to; unsusceptible to enjoyment or pleasurable excitement; one of those moods when what is pleasure at other times, becomes insipid or indifferent; the state, I should think, in which converts to Methodism usually are, when smitten by their first “conviction of sin.”

   • 1994, José Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World, University of Chicago Press, Chapter 2, p. 40,^[5]

     Of all social phenomena none is perhaps as protean and, consequently, as unsusceptible to binary classification as religion.

   Synonym: insusceptible