tractable
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tractable
- /ˈtɹæk.tə.bəl/ Australia, Canada, US, UK
Where it comes from
From Middle English tractable, tractabel, from Latin tractābilis (“that may be touched, handled, or managed”), from tractō (“take in hand, handle, manage”), frequentative of trahō (“draw”).
adjective more tractable · most tractable
- Capable of being easily led, taught, or managed. "Tess is queer." "But she's tractable at bottom. Leave her to me."
- Easy to deal with or manage. I have always found horses, an animal I am attached to, very tractable when treated with humanity and steadiness.
- Capable of being shaped; malleable. 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. . . .
- Capable of being handled or touched. 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 : [...]
- Sufficiently operationalizable or useful to allow a mathematical calculation to proceed toward a solution. 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.
- Algorithmically solvable fast enough to be practically relevant, typically in polynomial time.
