Incredulous, incredible, whatever. . .
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I thought this use of incredulous in a recent Forbes article was a malapropism for incredible:
If you thought that my May 23 report, confirming the leak of login data totaling an astonishing 184 million compromised credentials, was frightening, I hope you are sitting down now. Researchers have just confirmed what is also certainly the largest data breach ever, with an almost incredulous 16 billion login credentials, including passwords, exposed. As part of an ongoing investigation that started at the beginning of the year, the researchers have postulated that the massive password leak is the work of multiple infostealers. [emphasis added]
And maybe it was.
But the OED glosses this usage as obsolete a1616-1750, tracing it back to Shakespeare:
Still, quick searches for "incredulous number", "incredulous amount", "incredulous price", etc., show that the usage is Out There today.
Wiktionary agrees with the OED, glossing this sense as "Difficult to believe; incredible", and flagging it as "largely obsolete, now only nonstandard".
Merriam-Webster also gives this meaning as sense 3, and offers this Usage Guide:
Can incredulous mean 'incredible'?:
Sense 3 was revived in the 20th century after a couple of centuries of disuse. Although it is a sense with good literary precedent—among others Shakespeare used it—it is widely regarded as an error resulting from confusion with incredible, and its occurrence in published writing is rare.
…with a longer discussion here.
And Merriam-Webster's Concise Dictionary of English Usage also goes into more detail:
Fred said,
June 20, 2025 @ 7:22 am
If Winder had meant "incredible," why call 16 billion login credentials *almost* incredible? Unless perhaps he means that the researchers who confirmed the breach are "almost incredible" in the sense of almost *not* credible, although that would be an odd swipe to take, in my opinion.
Yuval said,
June 20, 2025 @ 9:34 am
Fred: I'd say this is because incredulous.3 isn't exactly the same as incredible, or rather it's a yet-unbleached version of it. So while incredible is nowadays simply an intensifier (which is indeed weird to modify using almost), incredulous.3 retains the pristine semantics of "(actually) defying comprehension, must be a lie", which I agree that the 16-billion figure is just shy of.
Fred said,
June 20, 2025 @ 9:57 am
In that case, "unbelievable" might be a better contemporary sense, unless the author really had meant to question the credibility of the researchers.
Coby said,
June 20, 2025 @ 11:50 am
Considering that incredible, in ordinary parlance, no longer means 'hard to believe' but something more like 'extraordinary, amazing' (just as legendary no longer means 'related to legend'), perhaps the writer deliberately chose something that would be more likely to evoke the original sense.
Chas Belov said,
June 20, 2025 @ 1:40 pm
I don't believe I have a small vocabulary, but I can't remember ever using "incredulous" in my life. I do think if I saw it used in the same way as "incredible" I'd have to look twice and even then not be sure I grokked the sentence.
I don't recall using "incredible" either (prior to this post, of course), but don't have the same certainty about my non-use that I have with "incredulous."