unpublished

British  

/ ˌʌnˈpʌblɪʃt /

adjective

1. not available in print for distribution and sale

2. having no written work issued for publication

   an unpublished undergraduate

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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Unpublished means not made public. If your phone number is unpublished, it’s not listed in the telephone directory and you’re safe from late-night calls from long-lost boyfriends. If you’re scrounging around in an old desk drawer and stumble upon an unpublished poem by Emily Dickinson, your discovery is likely to make you famous. A painting or a piece of music can also be described as unpublished if no one has written about it or put it into some kind of form available to a wider audience. If you're an aspiring author but nothing you've written has appeared in print yet, you're an unpublished author.

Example Sentences

The team also reports that unpublished experiments found similar regenerative benefits after treatment with the chemotherapy drug 5-fluorouracil, which is commonly used against colon and pancreatic cancers but can also injure the intestinal lining.

From Science Daily • May 21, 2026

Requests for things that weren’t available — say, an unpublished “Harry Potter” manuscript, if the timing were right — really did happen at Vogue in the aughts.

From Los Angeles Times • Apr. 30, 2026

It added that three other pieces of evidence Beiersdorf put forward to support its claim were all unpublished research, and said it had concerns about each one.

From BBC • Apr. 28, 2026

Based on thorough research of published and unpublished sources, as well as Native American oral tradition, the book gives this well-known story a fresh breadth of implication.

From The Wall Street Journal • Apr. 16, 2026

I also mentioned that at a library in New Mexico I had come across notes from an unpublished interview with the Fairfax town marshal, who had investigated the murders of the Osage.

From "Killers of the Flower Moon" by David Grann

Related Words

• classified