Unreliable

//ˌʌn.ɹɪˈlaɪ.ə.bl̩// adj, noun

adj, noun ·Common ·High school level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    One who or that which cannot be relied upon.

    "His employment by the leading papers in Chicago was intermittent, as he was classed among the unreliables. One could never tell when he was going to get drunk."

Adjective
  1. 1
    Not reliable.

    "Tell one another whether any one of you has ever heard me discuss such questions briefly or at length; and then you will realize that the other popular reports about me are equally unreliable."

Adjective
  1. 1
    not worthy of reliance or trust wordnet
  2. 2
    liable to be erroneous or misleading wordnet
  3. 3
    lacking a sense of responsibility wordnet
  4. 4
    dangerously unstable and unpredictable wordnet

Synonyms

All synonyms
erraticirresponsibletreacherousuncertainundependableunsound

Example

More examples

"Our experiment has revealed that his report was unreliable."

Etymology

From un- + reliable.

Related phrases

unreliable narrator

More for "unreliable"

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.