English Help Online's Blog

For today’s blog entry, I’d like to go over the adjectives “plausible” and “implausible”. We use them when we want to talk about something which a person says that likely to be believed or not believed. We can also use them when we are trying to figure out if something is true or not. Finally, they can be used to talk about the believability of a story in a novel, movie, or TV show. Let me give you some example sentences using them.

I was late for work because I overslept, but I can’t tell my boss that. I have to think of a plausible excuse for being late.

I can’t tell my boss that I was mugged on my way to work. This is a safe city, so that would be totally implausible.

Some people don’t think it’s plausible that a meteor hitting the earth could cause the dinosaurs to die, but I think it’s totally plausible.

Some people think it’s implausible that a meteor hitting the earth could cause the dinosaurs to die, but I don’t agree.

I like action movies even though most of the time the stories are not plausible at all.

I like action movies even though most of the time the stories are completely implausible.

The word “plausible” is used positively, and the word “implausible” is used negatively, so they are the opposite of each other. However, we can also say “not plausible”, as in my fifth example sentence. The only difference between “not plausible” and “implausible” is that “implausible” is slightly more formal than the other one.

Please note that we don’t usually use words like “very” or “really” to emphasize these adjectives. Instead, it’s more common to use words such as “totally” and “completely” in order to emphasize them.