''congenial'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20260904152658-00-⌔

congenial - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

Adjective

congenial (comparative more congenial, superlative most congenial)

• Having the same or very similar nature, personality, tastes, habits or interests.
  • ✤ Antonym: uncongenial
  • ✤ No sluggish tide congenial to the glooms;/This, as it frothed by, might have been a bath/For the fiend’s glowing hoof - to see the wrath/Of its black eddy bespate with flakes and spumes.¹
  • Friendly or sociable.
    • ✤ The congenial bartender makes the Hog’s Head an inviting place to hang out during the weekends.
  • Suitable to one’s needs.
    • ✤ What was it that made this notion of mimesis, in spite of its inherent difficulties that only the dialectical method enables him to avoid, seem so useful and congenial to Plato?**²
  • Agreeable to one’s disposition.
    • ✤ To the question ‘what is a “mechanical” process?’ Turing returned the characteristic answer ‘Something that can be done by a machine’ and he embarked on the highly congenial task of analysing the general notion of a computing machine.³

Etymology

From con- + genial.

Pronunciation

• IPA: /kənˈd͡ʒiːniəl/
• Audio (Southern England): 🔊

Printed 2026-09-04.

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Footnotes

1. 1855, Robert Browning, Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came, section XIX: ↩

2. 1961, J. A. Philip, “Mimesis in the Sophistês of Plato”, in Proceedings and Transactions of the American Philological Association 92, pages 453–468: ↩

3. 1995, Robin Gandy, “The Confluence of Ideas in 1936”, in The Universal Turing Machine—A Half-Century Survey: ↩