English

Adjective

biddable ‎(comparative more biddable, superlative most biddable)

1. Docile, amenable or compliant.
   • 1889, Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Chapter 12,

     She was a quite biddable creature and good-hearted, but she had a flow of talk that was as steady as a mill, and made your head sore like the drays and wagons in a city.

   • 1922, T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Chapter ,

     The conscripts took their fate unquestioning: resignedly, after the custom of Turkish peasantry. […] There was about them a hopeless, fever-wasted lack of initiative, which made them the most biddable, most enduring, and least spirited soldiers in the world.

   • 1933, Helen Simpson, The Woman on the Beast, Chapter 5,

     In the first years of his rule he had attempted to bring the meek Goanese to some knowledge of cultivation as the West understood it, but though they might be biddable, the soil and the sun were not.

   • 2005, Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945, Penguin, Part Two, Chapter XIII, p. 431,

     What Western diplomats thought they saw in Bucharest's anti-Russian autocrats were the germs of a new Tito: stable, biddable and more interested in local power than international disruption.

2. (bridge) Suitable for bidding.

Translations

Derived terms

• biddability
• biddably
• unbiddable

Anagrams

• adlibbed, ad libbed, ad-libbed