unpublished
Britishadjective
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not available in print for distribution and sale
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having no written work issued for publication
an unpublished undergraduate
Explanation
Unpublished means not made public. If your phone number is unpublished, it’s not listed in the telephone directory and you’re safe from late-night calls from long-lost boyfriends. If you’re scrounging around in an old desk drawer and stumble upon an unpublished poem by Emily Dickinson, your discovery is likely to make you famous. A painting or a piece of music can also be described as unpublished if no one has written about it or put it into some kind of form available to a wider audience. If you're an aspiring author but nothing you've written has appeared in print yet, you're an unpublished author.
Vocabulary lists containing unpublished
Talk Like Shakespeare Day, List 6
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Spelling Practice 2, Unit 6
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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.
The Bridget Jones Prize will be awarded to an unpublished writer, without an agent, based in the north of England as part of New Writing North's Northern Writers' Awards.
From BBC ● Oct. 21, 2026
Hamda sent his unpublished reportage to the Bayeux jury himself.
From Barron's ● Oct. 10, 2026
Before the landmark proof even appeared online, social media blew up with suspicion that OpenAI’s model had taken the groundbreaking, unpublished work of humans, which the company denies.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 12, 2026
The BEA previously derived its legal data from an unpublished survey in the consumer-price index that had an unusually small sample size.
From MarketWatch ● Jul. 22, 2026
All his major published works on political philosophy, including his Defence of the Constitution of the United States of America and Discourses on Davila, along with his unpublished autobiography, lacked coherent form.
From "Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation" by Joseph J. Ellis
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Get a wordDefinitions 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.
