unsubmersible

English

Etymology

un- +‎ submersible

Adjective

unsubmersible (not comparable)

1. Not submersible.
   • 1890 December 20, “To the North in a Balloon”, in Scientific American, volume 63, page 392:

     The car will be prepared for all emergencies by making it unsubmersible and furnishing it with runners for use as a sledge.

   • 2008, David G. Proverbs, C. A. Brebbia, Edmund Charles Penning-Rowsell, Flood Recovery, Innovation and Response, page 115:

     The last problem with dikes was that dike failure was seldom included in waring plans, primarilty because they often are believed unsubmersible by riverside dwellers.

   • 2010, Kensuke Fukushi, K M Hassan, R Honda, Sustainability in Food and Water: An Asian Perspective, page 128:

     Observation results indicated that drums/buckets or unsubmersible motor pumps were often used to collect water from dug wells/mixed dug well-boreholes.

2. Buoyant and resilient; unquashable.
   • 1914, Katherine Clemmons Gould, The crystal rood, page 7:

     It is conceivable that there might be in man a virtue as strong and buoyant, as unconquerable and unsubmersible, as the physical characteristics of his race, like them remaining insistently dominant through all the ages.

   • 1980, Stuart Schneiderman, How Lacan's Ideas Are Used in Clinical Practice, page 51:

     "He is unsubmersible." And he adds: "He believes in his wife, his belief is unshakable."

   • 1991, The Eighteenth Century: A Current Bibliography - Volume 17, page 85:

     his work — both positive and negative — tolled the knell of European empires in the long run to replace them by the unsubmersible nations of today.