impressionable

From French impressionnable, equivalent to impression +‎ -able. See also impressible.

impressionable (comparative more impressionable, superlative most impressionable)

1. Being easily influenced (especially of young people).
   • 1908, Elizabeth Strong Worthington, How to Cook Husbands, Library of Alexandria, →ISBN:

     I had never been an impressionable girl as far as men were concerned—I was not an impressionable woman.

   • 1925 July – 1926 May, A[rthur] Conan Doyle, “(please specify the chapter number)”, in The Land of Mist (eBook no. 0601351h.html), Australia: Project Gutenberg Australia, published April 2019:

     "Panbek is impressionable and full of emotion, with the temperament of the poet and all those little weaknesses, if we may call them so, which the poet pays as a ransom for his gifts."

   • 1954, Plato, translated by Hugh Tredennick, “Socrates on Trial: The Apology”, in The Last Days of Socrates (Penguin Classics), Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, →OCLC, page 20:

     Besides, there are a great many of these accusers, and they have been accusing me now for a great many years; and what is more, they approached you at the most impressionable age, when some of you were children or adolescents; and they literally won their case by default, because there was no one to defend me.

   • 2003, Jerilyn Fisher, Ellen S. Silber, Women in Literature: Reading Through the Lens of Gender, Greenwood Publishing Group, →ISBN, page 240:

     As a result, Miss Brodie calls on her authority over her "impressionable" students in order to urge them into roles she herself is too afraid to occupy.

   • 2011, Jamie Carlin Watson, Robert Arp, What's Good on TV?: Understanding Ethics Through Television, John Wiley & Sons, →ISBN:

     Sages and mothers have long noted that humans, especially young humans, are impressionable. It is supposed that the environment that one inhabits plays a large role in a child's behavioral and moral development.

impressionable (plural impressionables)

1. An impressionable person.
   • 1942, Frank Gervasi, War Has Seven Faces:

     They were the faces of the same gentlemen who plied the corruptibles in Rumania with cash and impressed the impressionables with Germany's power.

• William Dwight Whitney, Benjamin E[li] Smith, editors (1911), “impressionable”, in The Century Dictionary […], New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., →OCLC.