unpublished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an unpublished undergraduate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Unpublished means not made public. If your phone number is unpublished, it’s not listed in the telephone directory and you’re safe from late-night calls from long-lost boyfriends. If you’re scrounging around in an old desk drawer and stumble upon an unpublished poem by Emily Dickinson, your discovery is likely to make you famous. A painting or a piece of music can also be described as unpublished if no one has written about it or put it into some kind of form available to a wider audience. If you're an aspiring author but nothing you've written has appeared in print yet, you're an unpublished author.
Vocabulary lists containing unpublished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.
Adapted from an 1895 Arthur Schnitzler novella that went unpublished until this century, “Late Fame” is a character study and parable whose concerns extend by implication in several directions.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 6, 2026
BBC Wales has seen confirmation that Wood entered the Daniel Owen Memorial Prize, which is for unpublished novels of at least 50,000 words.
From BBC ● Aug. 6, 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The BEA previously derived its legal data from an unpublished survey in the consumer-price index that had an unusually small sample size.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
They were last marked just north of $80 a barrel —only $10 above prewar levels—in early Tuesday trading as investors adjust their bets heading into the newly agreed, but still unpublished, U.S.-Iran cease-fire terms.
From Barron's ● Jun. 16, 2026
In an early unpublished text from the 1590s he sought to demonstrate that Archimedes’ principle, that a body floats when it displaces its own weight in water, is necessarily true.
From "The Invention of Science" by David Wootton
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.
