Skip to content
OneKitly

uncertain

adjectivenounattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ʌnˈsɜːtən//
  • United States//ʌnˈsɜɹ.tən//

Not certain; unsure.

adjective

  1. 1

    Not certain; unsure.

    Conſider man without the protection and conduct of a ſuperior Being, and he is ſecure of nothing that he enjoys in this world, and uncertain of every thing that he hopes for.

  2. 2

    Not known for certain; questionable.

    Tomorrow's weather is uncertain.

  3. 3

    Not yet determined; undecided.

  4. 4

    Variable and subject to change.

  5. 5

    Fitful or unsteady.

    Turning back, then, toward the basement staircase, she began to grope her way through blinding darkness, but had taken only a few uncertain steps when, of a sudden, she stopped short and for a little stood like a stricken thing, quite motionless save that she quaked to her very marrow in the grasp of a great and enervating fear.

  6. 6

    Unpredictable or capricious.

    O, woman! in our hours of ease, / Uncertain, coy, and hard to please, / And variable as the shade / By the light quivering aspen made; […]

Etymology

From Middle English uncerteyn. By surface analysis, un- + certain.

noun

  1. 1

    Something uncertain.

    Thinking about the uncertain refines our perception of the certain, and generally this takes place in a framework in which the uncertain is the future and the certain is the present.

Forms

comparative
more uncertain, uncertainer
superlative
most uncertain, uncertainest
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).