Unintended

How to spell unintended

10 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce unintended

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does unintended mean?

1. adjectiveNot planned or meant; happening as an accidental or incidental result rather than by design.

Unintended in a sentence

• The new tax rule had several unintended consequences for small businesses.

• Her blunt email caused an unintended rift between the two teams.

Where does unintended come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The heart of this word is the Latin verb tendere, which literally meant 'to stretch', and its compound intendere, meaning 'to stretch toward' or 'to direct one's attention'. From that physical image of stretching the mind or aim toward something came the idea of intending, that is, planning or purposing an outcome. English took 'intend' through Old French in the 1300s, and 'intended' developed as the participle describing what someone deliberately aimed at. Prefixing the native Old English negative un- ('not') produced 'unintended', describing a result nobody aimed at. The same tendere root quietly powers a large family of relatives, including 'tension', 'extend', 'attention', and 'tendency', all of which involve some kind of stretching or directing. The spelling trap is purely the doubled n boundary where un- meets in-: writers must keep both, giving 'un-in-tended' rather than the tempting single 'unintended' with one n dropped.

How the word is built

• un- (not)
• in- (toward)
• tend (from Latin tendere: to stretch)
• -ed (adjective/past-participle suffix)