PLAUSIBILITY

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does plausibility mean? 

• PLAUSIBILITY (noun)
  The noun PLAUSIBILITY has 1 sense:

1. apparent validity

  Familiarity information: PLAUSIBILITY used as a noun is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• PLAUSIBILITY (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

Apparent validity

Classified under:

Nouns denoting attributes of people and objects

Synonyms:

plausibility; plausibleness

Hypernyms ("plausibility" is a kind of...):

believability; credibility; credibleness (the quality of being believable or trustworthy)

Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "plausibility"):

reasonableness; tenability; tenableness (the quality of being plausible or acceptable to a reasonable person)

Antonym:

implausibility (the quality of provoking disbelief)

Derivation:

plausible (apparently reasonable and credible, and therefore convincing)

 Context examples 

Neither is reason among them a point problematical, as with us, where men can argue with plausibility on both sides of the question, but strikes you with immediate conviction; as it must needs do, where it is not mingled, obscured, or discoloured, by passion and interest.

(Gulliver's Travels into several remote nations of the world, by Jonathan Swift)

The logical plausibility of it, that made an appeal to his intellect, seemed missed by Kreis and Hamilton, who sneered at Norton as a metaphysician, and who, in turn, sneered back at them as metaphysicians.

(Martin Eden, by Jack London)

In support of the plausibility of this conjecture, it further occurred to her that the forbidden gallery, in which lay the apartments of the unfortunate Mrs. Tilney, must be, as certainly as her memory could guide her, exactly over this suspected range of cells, and the staircase by the side of those apartments of which she had caught a transient glimpse, communicating by some secret means with those cells, might well have favoured the barbarous proceedings of her husband.

(Northanger Abbey, by Jane Austen)