intractable
C1CEFR level
60/100Rarity: rare
FormalRegister
General adjective
Hard to control, manage or solve.
Youth unemployment remained an intractable problem no policy seemed to shift.
Medicine adjective
Hard to control or treat; not yielding to therapy.
The team escalated care for his intractable pain.
Business adjective
Extremely difficult to manage, solve, or resolve.
The royalty dispute proved intractable until a neutral valuer was appointed.
Rarity runs from 0 (a word everyone knows) to 100 (almost never seen outside specialist or literary writing). Level is the word's real difficulty on the CEFR scale, from A1 to C2.
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