tractable

Etymology

From Middle English tractable, tractabel, from Latin tractābilis (“that may be touched, handled, or managed”), from tractō (“take in hand, handle, manage”), frequentative of trahō (“draw”).

adj

1. (of people) Capable of being easily led, taught, or managed.
   "Tess is queer." "But she's tractable at bottom. Leave her to me." 1891, Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, volume 1, London: James R. Osgood, McIlvaine and Co., page 45
2. (of a problem) Easy to deal with or manage
   [T]his matter of the vanishing bridge must have been arranged in order to put him in a properly subdued and tractable frame of mind. 1909, Louis Joseph Vance, chapter 18, in The Bronze Bell
   Some masters can be quite kind if you're meek and tractable. 2008, Lynn Flewelling, Shadows Return, page 96
3. Capable of being shaped; malleable.
   I need not point out the advantages of modelling in a material as durable as stone. . . . Mixed up with just enough water to form a stiff paste, it accommodates itself to the touch of the modelling tool. . . . There are two inherent difficulties in using it—one, it is not so tractable as clay. . . . 1866, P. Le Neve Foster, "Report on the Art-Workmanship Prizes", reprinted in Journal of the Society of Arts, March 2, 1966
4. (obsolete) Capable of being handled or touched.
   At leaſt five Hundred of theſe reforming Vultures are daily plundering our Pockets, and ranſacking our Houſes, leaving me ſometimes not one pair of Tractable Buttocks in my Vaulting-School to provide for my Family, or earn me ſo much as a Pudding for my next Sundays Dinner : … 1707, Thomas Brown, “Moll Quarles's Answer to Mother Creswell of Famous Memory”, in The Second Volume of the Works of Mr. Tho. Brown, containing Letters from the Dead to the Living both Serious and Comical, part three, page 184
5. (mathematics) Sufficiently operationalizable or useful to allow a mathematical calculation to proceed toward a solution.
   This assumption is in the Raiffa and Schlaifer (1961, p. 72) spirit of using ‘a little ingenuity. . . to find a tractable function’ to quantify risk-preferences and probability judgments so as to make the analysis feasible. 1987, Ira Horowitz, “Market Structure Implications of Export-Price Uncertainty”, in Managerial and Decision Economics, volume 8, number 2, page 134
6. (computer science, of a decision problem) Algorithmically solvable fast enough to be practically relevant, typically in polynomial time.