tractable
Americanadjective
-
easily managed or controlled; docile; yielding.
a tractable child; a tractable disposition.
- Synonyms:
- governable, willing, manageable
- Antonyms:
- stubborn
-
easily worked, shaped, or otherwise handled; malleable.
adjective
-
easily controlled or persuaded
-
readily worked; malleable
Other Word Forms
Etymology
Origin of tractable
1495–1505; < Latin tractābilis, equivalent to tractā ( re ) to handle, deal with (frequentative of trahere to draw) + -bilis -ble
Explanation
If your little brother quietly obeys your instructions and waits for you at the food court while you and your friends wander around the mall, he's probably a tractable child, meaning he's obedient, flexible, and responds well to directions. Note the similarity between tractable and tractor. Both come from the Latin word tractare, which originally meant "to drag about." You can think of a tractable person as someone who can be dragged about easily, like a plow being dragged by a tractor.
Vocabulary lists containing tractable
Dog Vocabulary: A Canine Lexicon
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Animal Farm
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ASVAB Word Knowledge
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
Instead, the team broke down their unanswerable question—will the breeding program work—into four smaller, more tractable assumptions:
From Slate • Apr. 28, 2026
The question whether we’re building conscious machines is scientifically tractable.
From The Wall Street Journal • Dec. 25, 2025
“Social media is the problem, and it’s really the algorithms” provides a very simple and tractable solution, which is that you fix the algorithms.
From Salon • Oct. 25, 2024
While this makes the problem mathematically tractable, it raises the obvious question -- is it true?
From Science Daily • May 8, 2024
But the second problem, Herschel thought, was more tractable: Once life had been created, what process generated the observed diversity of the natural world?
From "The Gene" by Siddhartha Mukherjee
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
