unputdownable

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

an informal adjective, more common in British than American English, describing a book so gripping and compelling that the reader finds it impossible to stop reading and put it aside; unputdownable functions as the highest compliment a casual reader can pay to fiction, capturing the quality of narrative propulsion — the combination of suspense, character investment, pacing, and revelation — that makes a book feel like a necessity rather than a choice; the word is a playful coinage that turns the physical act of setting down a book into a negated possibility, implying that the reading compulsion is physical as well as intellectual; it appears frequently in blurbs, reviews, and reader recommendations and is particularly associated with commercial fiction in the thriller, crime, and romance genres, though readers use it for literary fiction whenever a book achieves the quality of making them subordinate sleep and social obligations to the need to know what happens next