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unacceptable

adjectivenouncommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˌʌn.ækˈsɛp.tə.bl̩//
  • United Kingdom//ˌʌn.əkˈsɛp.tə.bl̩//
  • United Kingdom/[ˌɐn.ækˈsɛp.tə.bɫ̩]/
  • United Kingdom/[ˌɐn.əkˈsɛp.tə.bɫ̩]/
  • United States//ˌʌn.ækˈsɛp.tə.bl̩//

Unsatisfactory; not acceptable.

adjective

  1. 1

    Unsatisfactory; not acceptable.

    "This shocking report proves once again that we urgently need a radical shake-up of hospital care," said Jeremy Hughes, chief executive of the Alzheimer's Society. "Given that people with dementia occupy a quarter of hospital beds and that many leave in worse health than when they were admitted, it is unacceptable that training in dementia care is not the norm."

    The British Transport Commission (BTC) was created to own not just the railways, but also London Underground, docks, inland waterways, and some road haulage activities. Its remit was to operate on a break-even basis, with sustained losses unacceptable.

  2. 2

    Not conforming to accepted usage.

Etymology

From Middle English unacceptabylle, equivalent to un- + acceptable.

noun

  1. 1

    Something that is not acceptable.

    Second, the data collected using CASEMAP afford us the opportunity to conduct market segmentation analyses based on the similarity in the pattern of unacceptables and/or the benefits that consumers seek in the category.

Forms

plural
unacceptables
comparative
more unacceptable
superlative
most unacceptable
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).