Word family noun practical practicalities practicality ≠ impracticality practicability ≠ impracticability adjective practicable ≠ impracticable practical ≠ impractical adverb practically ≠ impractically practicably ≠ impracticably
From Longman Dictionary of Contemporary Englishimpracticalim‧prac‧ti‧cal /ɪmˈpræktɪkəl/ adjective 1 IMPOSSIBLEnot sensible or possible for practical reasons The road toll scheme was dismissed as impractical. James was a foolish man, full of impractical plans.► see thesaurus at impossible2 STUPID/NOT SENSIBLEnot good at dealing with ordinary practical matters, such as making or repairing things Sandra was hopelessly impractical around the house. —impractically /-kli/ adverb —impracticality /ɪmˌpræktɪˈkæləti/ noun [uncountable] the sheer impracticality of collecting DNA from such a large populationExamples from the Corpus
impractical• Silk is always wonderful too, if totally impractical.• To some, the initiative and referenda have proliferated to the point that they already have become onerous and impractical.• Officials stated that building a dam for irrigation purposes was hopelessly impractical.• Ritter plans to tear down the building, saying restoration would be impractical.• Many tasks will require millions or even billions of nanomachines to achieve results, and manually constructing each one is utterly impractical.• Telling people to avoid any exposure to the sun is impractical advice.• Here on the dang strict purdah is impractical and everyone understands this, brothers-in-law included.• But all the goals were wildly impractical and none were achieved.• Short skirts are impractical if you want to sit down once in awhile.• In circumstances when words are inappropriate or impractical, the apology may take the form of an elaborate pantomime of contrition.• It would be impractical to attempt to review all the types of multimedia technology in this study.• Not withstanding that recognition, he decided it was impractical to break them into more than two pieces. 