out of the question

English

Pronunciation

• Audio (General Australian):

  (file)

Adjective

out of the question (comparative more out of the question, superlative most out of the question)

1. (idiomatic) Not remotely possible.
   • 1898, Arthur Conan Doyle, The Lost Special:

     A second special was out of the question, as the ordinary local service was already somewhat deranged by the first.

   • 1910, Emerson Hough, chapter II, in The Purchase Price: Or The Cause of Compromise, Indianapolis, Ind.: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, →OCLC:

     Carried somehow, somewhither, for some reason, on these surging floods, were these travelers, […]. Even such a boat as the Mount Vernon offered a total deck space so cramped as to leave secrecy or privacy well out of the question, even had the motley and democratic assemblage of passengers been disposed to accord either.

   • 2012 March 22, Scott Tobias, AV Club, The Hunger Games‎^[1]:

     If Suzanne Collins’ novel The Hunger Games turns up on middle-school curricula 50 years from now—and as accessible dystopian science fiction with allusions to early-21st-century strife, that isn’t out of the question—the lazy students of the future can be assured that they can watch the movie version and still get better than a passing grade.

Quotations

• For quotations using this term, see Citations:out of the question.

Translations

not remotely possible

• Chinese:

  Mandarin: 根本不可能的 (gēnběn bù kěnéng de), 免談／免谈 (miǎntán)

• Dutch: nicht im Frage
• Finnish: ei tule kysymykseen
• French: hors de question (fr), pas question (fr), exclu (fr) m
• German: außer Frage
• Hebrew: לא בא בחשבון
• Hungarian: ki van zárva, kizárt dolog, szó sem lehet róla (hu)
• Icelandic: út úr kortinu
• Japanese: 問題外 (ja) (もんだいがい, mondaigai), 問題にならない (mondai ni naranai)
• Macedonian: не доаѓа во предвид (ne doaǵa vo predvid)
• Norwegian:

  Bokmål: kommer ikke på tale, ikke tale om

• Polish: nie ma mowy (pl)
• Russian: не мо́жет быть и ре́чи (ne móžet bytʹ i réči)
• Spanish: fuera de discusión
• Swedish: inte komma på fråga
• Urdu: سوال ہی نہیں پیدا ہوتا (savāl hī nahī̃ paidā hōtā) (literally 'the question cannot be born')