Adjective
tractable (comparative more tractable, superlative most tractable)
- (of people) Capable of being easily led, taught, or managed.
- Synonyms: docile, manageable, governable
- (of a problem) Easy to deal with or manage
1791 (date written), Mary Wollstonecraft, “Some Instances of the Folly which the Ignorance of Women Generates; with Concluding Reflections on the Moral Improvement that a Revolution in Female Manners may Naturally be Expected to Produce”, in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: With Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects, London: […] J[oseph] Johnson, […], published 1792, →OCLC, page 440:I have always found horses, an animal I am attached to, very tractable when treated with humanity and steadiness.
1838 March – 1839 October, Charles Dickens, chapter 61, in The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, London: Chapman and Hall, […], published 1839, →OCLC:Of all the tractable, equal-tempered, attached, and faithful beings that ever lived, I believe he was the most so.
1909, Louis Joseph Vance, chapter 18, in The Bronze Bell:[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.
2008, Lynn Flewelling, Shadows Return, →ISBN, page 96:Some masters can be quite kind if you're meek and tractable.
- Capable of being shaped; malleable.
- 1866, P. Le Neve Foster, "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. . . .
- (obsolete) Capable of being handled or touched.[1]
- Synonyms: palpable, practicable, feasible, serviceable
1707, Thomas Brown, “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:At leaſt five Hundred of theſe reforming Vultures are daily plundering our Pockets, and ranſacking our Houſes, leaving me ſometimes not one pair of Tractable Buttocks in my Vaulting-School to provide for my Family, or earn me ſo much as a Pudding for my next Sundays Dinner : [...]
- (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”, in Managerial and Decision Economics, volume 8, number 2, page 134: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.
- (computer science, of a decision problem) Algorithmically solvable fast enough to be practically relevant, typically in polynomial time.
Translations
capable of being easily led
capable of being handled or touched