incommensurable.

Not adequately comparable by a shared measure or standard.

Use it for

Words that belong together

• incommensurable values
• incommensurable frameworks
• apparently incommensurable goals

On the page

The panel treated dignity and revenue as incommensurable values.

Two grading systems are not necessarily incommensurable merely because their scales differ.

The theories appeared incommensurable until the underlying definitions were compared.

Usage notes

Primary category: academic. Formal and academic; stronger than merely unequal. It can concern incompatible frameworks as well as quantities without a common measure. Do not use to mean very large. Normally non-gradable in this sense; comparison requires a specific contextual scale. Derived family (not inflections): incommensurability.