unintended
Britishadjective
Explanation
If you do something without planning or meaning to do it, it's unintended. An unintended consequence of your fun day at the beach is your painful, peeling sunburn. To intend is to plan or aim to do something. When you don't intend to do something but it happens anyway, it's unintended. An unintended side effect of your winning the 50-yard dash might be the extreme envy of your sister, who's very athletic and loves to win. And if you let her trim your hair later, you may just end up with unintended bangs!
Vocabulary lists containing unintended
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 gym booking incident is not considered a serious cyber-attack but is another example of the unintended consequences of tasking sophisticated AI bots with jobs.
From BBC ● Aug. 11, 2026
“It’s certainly not an unintended consequence,” Silver said last month.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 9, 2026
If it’s touching a nerve that’s unintended, address it.
From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 6, 2026
Although many tool compounds are unsuitable for use as medicines because they may affect unintended targets or cause toxicity, they are still highly valuable for investigating what a protein does.
From Science Daily ● Aug. 3, 2026
Why is the tree on the bottom, with the unintended meaning, the one the reader arrived at?
From "The Sense of Style" by Steven Pinker
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.
