UNPRINCIPLED

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does unprincipled mean? 

• UNPRINCIPLED (adjective)
  The adjective UNPRINCIPLED has 2 senses:

1. lacking principles or moral scruples

2. having little or no integrity

  Familiarity information: UNPRINCIPLED used as an adjective is rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• UNPRINCIPLED (adjective)

Sense 1

Meaning:

Lacking principles or moral scruples

Context example:

freedom from coarse unprincipled calumny

Also:

unscrupulous (without scruples or principles)

Antonym:

principled (based on or manifesting objectively defined standards of rightness or morality)

Sense 2

Meaning:

Having little or no integrity

Similar:

dishonorable; dishonourable (lacking honor or integrity; deserving dishonor)

 Context examples 

She must be an unprincipled one, or she could not have used your brother so.

(Northanger Abbey, by Jane Austen)

Giacinta was unprincipled and violent: I tired of her in three months.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

He is a brilliant fellow when he chooses to work—one of the brightest intellects of the university; but he is wayward, dissipated, and unprincipled.

(The Return of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

Her indignation would have been still stronger than it was, had she not witnessed that embarrassment which seemed to speak a consciousness of his own misconduct, and prevented her from believing him so unprincipled as to have been sporting with the affections of her sister from the first, without any design that would bear investigation.

(Sense and Sensibility, by Jane Austen)

Every lingering struggle in his favour grew fainter and fainter; and in farther justification of Mr. Darcy, she could not but allow that Mr. Bingley, when questioned by Jane, had long ago asserted his blamelessness in the affair; that proud and repulsive as were his manners, she had never, in the whole course of their acquaintance—an acquaintance which had latterly brought them much together, and given her a sort of intimacy with his ways—seen anything that betrayed him to be unprincipled or unjust—anything that spoke him of irreligious or immoral habits; that among his own connections he was esteemed and valued—that even Wickham had allowed him merit as a brother, and that she had often heard him speak so affectionately of his sister as to prove him capable of some amiable feeling; that had his actions been what Mr. Wickham represented them, so gross a violation of everything right could hardly have been concealed from the world; and that friendship between a person capable of it, and such an amiable man as Mr. Bingley, was incomprehensible.

(Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen)

My business was to declare myself a scoundrel, and whether I did it with a bow or a bluster was of little importance.— 'I am ruined for ever in their opinion—' said I to myself—'I am shut out for ever from their society, they already think me an unprincipled fellow, this letter will only make them think me a blackguard one.' Such were my reasonings, as, in a sort of desperate carelessness, I copied my wife's words, and parted with the last relics of Marianne.

(Sense and Sensibility, by Jane Austen)

She paused over it for some time with indignant astonishment; then read it again and again; but every perusal only served to increase her abhorrence of the man, and so bitter were her feelings against him, that she dared not trust herself to speak, lest she might wound Marianne still deeper by treating their disengagement, not as a loss to her of any possible good but as an escape from the worst and most irremediable of all evils, a connection, for life, with an unprincipled man, as a deliverance the most real, a blessing the most important.

(Sense and Sensibility, by Jane Austen)