What does arienai mean?

[seiryuu]

What is ありえない？ I've heard quite a few times, but I don't know what it means.

[Yuni]

Where did u find it? i wanna know the meaning too.

[aKuMu]

有りえない　would be "not likely / unlikely" or "not possible"

[seiryuu]

Thanks.
@Yuni: By the way, I found this from a song lyric. I've heard it before, and actually seen the anime it was in with the kana on, and the subtitle was wrong. It said arienai was down (as in the sense of depressed), and I wasn't really sure.

[clay]

ありえない in standard Japanese is much stronger, meaning something like 'absolutely impossible' but lately in slangish Japanese it has a feeling of 'Now way!' or a replacement for うそ！

I am not in Japan or around a lot of young people, so it could be only teenagers use this. May not want to add it to your active vocab. Still, you hear it often on TV.

[CviCvraeVtMoriar]

[edit]How did you guys respond so quickly? When I started writing this, there were only two posts, including the original.[/edit]

あり得ない means "cannot be".

そんなことはあり得ない。
Such a thing cannot be.

そんなことは起こり得ない。
Such a thing cannot happen.

得る （the positive form of 得ない。 (duh)) has two possible readings, uru and eru, but they are not always interchangable. In the unconjugated, or dictionary, form, 得る can be pronounced either uru or eru. However, that is not true of the other forms.

Here's a list of the possibilites:

えない (negative）

えた/て (past/ te=form)

えよう (pseudo-futurum/conjectural form)

えます (masu form)

うれば (ば conditional form)


This verb can be attached to just about any other verb representing a non-controllable action to indicate potentiality/possibility.