Unoriginal
adj, noun ·Moderate ·College level
Definitions
- 1 A person or work that does not exhibit originality.
"Ahmad (1969) studied the personality differences among middle school girls identified as originals and unoriginals on the Minnesota's test of creative thinking."
- 1 Lacking originality.
"1758, William Hawkins, Tracts in Divinity, Oxford, Volume 2, Letter 12 [on Pope’ translations of Homer], pp. 418-419, Redundancies are as unoriginal as Insipidities, and the Spirit of an Author may be as much overwhelmed in Exuberance on the one Hand, as it evaporates in Frigidity on the other."
- 2 Not being the first or earliest version of something, not original. rare
"1894, Joseph Jacobs (editor), More Celtic Fairy Tales, London: David Nutt, Notes and References, “The Leeching of Kayn’s Leg,” p. 232, [This tale] occurs in an MS. of the fifteenth century in an obviously unoriginal form which shows that the story-teller did not appreciate the significance of many features in the folk-tale he was retelling […]"
- 3 Without an origin or source. obsolete
"[I] plung’d in the womb Of unoriginal Night and Chaos wilde,"
- 1 not original; not being or productive of something fresh and unusual wordnet
Antonyms
All antonymsExample
More examples"His life story is, in point of fact, vastly more complex and many-sided than the following handful of unpretentious and unoriginal pages suggest."
Etymology
From un- + original.
More for "unoriginal"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.