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unethical

adjectiveattested in dialogue

  • //ʌnˈɛθɪkəl//

Breaching the established standards of conduct or behavior within a particular organization or profession.

adjective

  1. 1

    Breaching the established standards of conduct or behavior within a particular organization or profession.

    He was sacked for unethical conduct.

    The following potentially unethical coding practices are presented along with the standard from the AHIMA Standards of Ethical Coding that they may violate.

    However, occasionally one encounters unethical but not immoral practice, because in China, market regulations are neither sufficient nor regularly updated.

    For example, individuals accused of unethical conduct might challenge the decision rendered by an ethics review panel if they were displeased with the ethics review process or outcome.

  2. 2

    Immoral, morally wrong.

    The Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research in San Antonio, Texas is one of only a handful of sites around the world that conduct medical research on great apes. Scientists say their research is conducted humanely, but many animal rights groups say testing on chimps is unneeded and unethical.

Etymology

Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *né Proto-Indo-European *n̥- Proto-Germanic *un- Proto-West Germanic *un- Old English un- Middle English un- English un- English ethical English unethical From un- + ethical.

Forms

comparative
more unethical
superlative
most unethical
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).