Unpublished

How to spell unpublished

11 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce unpublished

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does unpublished mean?

1. adjectiveNot yet issued in print or made publicly available.

Unpublished in a sentence

• The author left several unpublished manuscripts in a drawer.

• The report cited unpublished data from an internal study.

Where does unpublished come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The core of this word is 'publish', which English took in the 1300s from the Old French verb 'publier', itself descended from the Latin 'publicare', meaning 'to make public' or 'to bring before the people'. That Latin verb grew out of 'publicus', the adjective for 'of the people' or 'belonging to the state', so at heart the idea is making something openly available to everyone. The negative prefix 'un-' is native English, going back to Old English and the older Germanic languages, where it simply reversed or negated the word it attached to. The '-ed' ending turns the verb into a participle that works as an adjective describing the resulting state. Put together, 'unpublished' literally describes something that has not been made public, and because the prefix is just bolted onto a familiar word, the spelling trap is mainly remembering the single 'l' and the silent 'sh' written as 'sh' rather than anything more exotic.

How the word is built

• un- (not)
• publish (from Latin publicare: to make public)
• -ed (adjective/past-participle suffix)