Unscrupulous

How to spell unscrupulous

12 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce unscrupulous

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does unscrupulous mean?

1. adjectiveHaving or showing no moral principles; willing to act dishonestly or unfairly for personal gain.

Unscrupulous in a sentence

• The unscrupulous landlord pocketed the deposits and ignored the repairs.

• Investors lost their savings to an unscrupulous broker who hid the risks.

Where does unscrupulous come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The heart of this word is the Latin scrupulus, which literally meant 'a small sharp stone', the kind of pebble that lodges in a sandal and pricks the foot with every step. Roman writers, notably Cicero, turned that physical irritation into a metaphor for a nagging moral doubt or twinge of conscience, and from that came the English noun 'scruple', a hesitation about doing something one feels to be wrong. The adjective 'scrupulous' described a person careful to honour those moral twinges, and adding the negative prefix un- produced 'unscrupulous', someone who feels no such prick of conscience at all. English assembled the word in the seventeenth century from these Latin building blocks. The spelling trap lives in the middle: the unstressed -pu- and the single 'l' before -ous are easy to mishandle once you remember the buried pebble, scrupul-.

How the word is built

• un- (not)
• scrupul- (from Latin scrupulus, a small sharp pebble, hence a nagging doubt)
• -ous (full of)