preventable

/prɪˈvɛntəbəl/

Say it: pri-VEN-tuh-bull

adjective Able to be stopped from happening or existing.
Most workplace accidents are preventable with proper safety training.

📖 Seen in the wild

Many common diseases are preventable through vaccination and healthy lifestyle choices.
collected by @vocablast

✏️ preventable in a sentence

The official inquiry found that the dam's collapse was preventable.
Many chronic illnesses are preventable through lifestyle changes like diet and exercise.
It's a shame the misunderstanding happened; it was completely preventable.
The goal of the new software is to reduce preventable data entry errors.
According to the report, a significant percentage of food waste is preventable.
He felt a deep sense of guilt over the preventable tragedy.

🔁 Synonyms & antonyms

avoidable stoppable avertible remediable controllable obviable forestallable

avoidable · often implies that a personal choice could have been made to sidestep the outcome.

stoppable · focuses on halting something that is already in progress.

avertible · suggests that a negative event, often a large-scale disaster, could have been turned aside.

remediable · implies the problem could have been corrected or fixed before it became serious.

Opposites: unpreventable, inevitable, unavoidable, inescapable

🌱 Where it comes from

The word is a straightforward combination of the verb 'prevent' and the suffix '-able'. 'Prevent' itself comes from the Latin 'praevenire', which means 'to come before' or 'to anticipate'. This origin highlights the core idea of acting ahead of time to stop something from occurring.

🧩 How it's used

Common patterns:

preventable deathpreventable diseasepreventable accidentlargely preventableentirely preventablepreventable harm

Preventable is most often used to describe negative events like accidents, diseases, and errors. While the word is technically neutral, its use implies that a failure occurred and that someone or something could have acted differently to stop the bad outcome. It is slightly more formal than 'avoidable', which can also carry a stronger sense of personal choice in sidestepping a situation.

Word family: prevent, prevention, preventive, unpreventable

💬 Quick answers

What does preventable mean?

It means that something, typically a negative event like an accident or illness, could have been stopped from happening through some action.

What is the difference between preventable and avoidable?

'Preventable' often refers to stopping an event from ever starting, especially on a larger scale. 'Avoidable' can imply sidestepping a situation that already exists. However, in many cases, they are used as synonyms.

Is preventable a formal word?

Preventable is a neutral word that is appropriate in both formal contexts, like medical reports and news articles, and informal conversation.

What is the opposite of preventable?

The most direct opposite is 'unpreventable'. Other common antonyms that mean something was bound to happen include 'inevitable' and 'unavoidable'.

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