unavailable
Britishadjective
Explanation
If you can't meet your friend for dinner on Tuesday because you have other plans, you are unavailable. If the shoes you want have been sold out, they are unavailable. Unavailable means not accessible. If you avail yourself of something, you use it or take advantage of it. You might avail yourself of discount tickets to the theater provided by your school. If the tickets are all sold out, they are unavailable to you. In the context of dating, if someone is unavailable, he or she is already in a steady relationship or married. Someone emotionally unavailable is not open to sharing their feelings.
Vocabulary lists containing unavailable
Nobody's Home: Synonyms For "Absent"
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Absent
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
It’s not as though this information was unavailable to Coppins’ editors.
From Slate • May 5, 2026
Polymarket, which has an offshore platform unavailable to users in the U.S., changed its rules in March to explicitly prohibit insider trading there.
From The Wall Street Journal • Apr. 30, 2026
At 09:30 BST on Tuesday, the website was still down with a message reading: "Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance. Check back in a minute."
From BBC • Apr. 28, 2026
But FSD remains unavailable in most of the European Union, with the exception of the Netherlands, which approved the system this month.
From MarketWatch • Apr. 23, 2026
While blueprint copying and modification are the most straightforward option for transmitting technology, that option is sometimes unavailable.
From "Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies" by Jared M. Diamond
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
