biddable
adj/ˈbɪdəbəl/
Etymology From bid + -able.
1
Docile, amenable or compliant.
- 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.1889, Mark Twain, chapter 12, in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court:
- 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.1922, T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Chapter:
2 more examples
- 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.1933, Helen Simpson, chapter 5, in The Woman on the Beast:
- 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.2005, Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945, Penguin, Part Two, Chapter XIII, p. 431:
- Derived terms
- biddability, biddableness, biddably, unbiddable