Supple vs Tractable - What's the difference?
supple | tractable | Related terms |
pliant, flexible, easy to bend
lithe and agile when moving and bending
compliant; yielding to the will of others
* John Locke
To make or become supple.
* Dryden
* Spenser
To make compliant, submissive, or obedient.
* John Locke
* Barrow
Capable of being easily led, taught, or managed; docile; manageable; governable.
* 1792 , , A Vindication of the Rights of Woman , ch. 13:
* 1839 , Nicholas Nickleby , ch. 61:
* 1909 , , The Bronze Bell , ch. 18:
* 2008 , , Shadows Return , ISBN 9780553590081,
Capable of being shaped; malleable.
* 1866 , P. Le Neve Foster, "
(obsolete) Capable of being handled or touched; palpable; practicable; feasible; serviceable.
* 1707 , , "Moll Quarles's Answer to Mother Creswell of Famous Memory" in The Second Volume of the Works of Mr. Tho. Brown, containing Letters from the Dead to the Living both Serious and Comical , part three, page 184:
(mathematics) Sufficiently operationalizable or useful to allow a mathematical calculation to proceed toward a solution.
* 1987 , Ira Horowitz, "Market Structure Implications of Export-Price Uncertainty," Managerial and Decision Economics , vol. 8, no. 2, p. 134:
(computer science) Of a decision problem, algorithmically solvable fast enough to be practically relevant, typically in polynomial time.
Supple is a related term of tractable.
As adjectives the difference between supple and tractable
is that supple is pliant, flexible, easy to bend while tractable is capable of being easily led, taught, or managed; docile; manageable; governable.As a verb supple
is to make or become supple.supple
English
Adjective
(er)- supple''' joints; '''supple fingers
- a supple horse
- If punishment makes not the will supple , it hardens the offender.
Verb
- The stones suppled into softness as they fell.
- The flesh therewith she suppled and did steep.
- a mother persisting till she had bent her daughter's mind and suppled her will
- They should supple our stiff willfulness.
tractable
English
Adjective
(en adjective)- I have always found horses, an animal I am attached to, very tractable when treated with humanity and steadiness.
- Of all the tractable , equal-tempered, attached, and faithful beings that ever lived, I believe he was the most so.
- [T]his matter of the vanishing bridge must have been arranged in order to put him in a properly subdued and tractable frame of mind.
p. 96:
- Some masters can be quite kind if you're meek and tractable .
Report on the Art-Workmanship Prizes", reprinted in Journal of the Society of Arts , March 2, 1966:
- I need not point out the advantages of modelling in a material as durable as stone. . . . Mixed up with just enough water to form a stiff paste, it accommodates itself to the touch of the modelling tool. . . . There are two inherent difficulties in using it—one, it is not so tractable as clay. . . .
- At lea?t five Hundred of the?e reforming Vultures are daily plundering our Pockets, and ran?acking our Hou?es, leaving me ?ometimes not one pair of Tractable Buttocks in my Vaulting-School to provide for my Family, or earn me ?o much as a Pudding for my next Sundays Dinner : [...]
- This assumption is in the Raiffa and Schlaifer (1961, p. 72) spirit of using ‘a little ingenuity. . . to find a tractable function’ to quantify risk-preferences and probability judgments so as to make the analysis feasible.