Preventible

Part of speech: adjective

Definitions

1. Able to be stopped or avoided before it happens
2. Possible to take actions that stop something from occurring
3. Something that can be kept from taking place through effort

Etymology: "Preventible" is a plain English formation: the verb "prevent" with the suffix "-ible," which turns a verb into an adjective meaning "able to be" the thing the verb describes. So a preventible outcome is one that could be stopped by action beforehand. The suffix has a longer road behind it. Its ancestry runs through Latin "-bilis" and "-ibilis," which attached to verb stems to mean "capable of being," then passed through Old French "-ible" into Middle English as "-ible." English speakers then attached it freely to native and borrowed verbs, which is why the ending appears in so many words, from "visible" to "washable." The verb "prevent" itself comes from Latin "praevenire," meaning "to come before," built from "prae" ("before") and "venire" ("to come"). Its original sense was to arrive ahead of someone or something, and only later did it come to mean to forestall or stop an event, which is the sense "preventible" depends on.

Synonyms: avoiding, avertable, preventable, controllable, avoidable

Antonyms: inevitable, unpreventable, certain, inexorable, unavoidable