unfettered
Britishadjective
Explanation
The adjective unfettered describes something or someone uninhibited and unrestrained. If you write mysteries novels for a living you probably turn your unfettered imagination to murder and mayhem. Unfettered comes from the Old English root word fetor, which was a chain or shackle for the feet. Un- means "not," so originally the word literally meant "not chained or shackled." Today there isn't much real shackling going on, so the adjective unfettered mainly describes something that is free or unrestrained. You'll see such uses as unfettered emotions, unfettered stock market growth, and unfettered speech.
Vocabulary lists containing unfettered
"Letter from Birmingham Jail" by Martin Luther King, Jr. (1963)
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Unbroken
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100 SAT Words Beginning with "U"
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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.
He told the UN Human Rights Council that his office had "requested the official list of those released, as well as unfettered access to several detention centres, so far without success".
From BBC • Mar. 16, 2026
“It’s not just like unfettered mass surveillance,” Siminoff told the New York Times.
From Salon • Feb. 20, 2026
In late 2022, the maker of ChatGPT started giving away unfettered acccess to its automatic speech recognition model called Whisper, trained on 680,000 hours of multilingual data.
From Los Angeles Times • Jan. 29, 2026
College leaders wanted deals to look more like endorsement contracts and less like unfettered booster cash.
From The Wall Street Journal • Jan. 1, 2026
The noises only made me remember more: the times I’d been out there, feeling unfettered in the city that was mine as much as anyone else’s.
From "The Red Car to Hollywood" by Jennie Liu
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.
