UNSCRUPULOUS

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does unscrupulous mean? 

• UNSCRUPULOUS (adjective)
  The adjective UNSCRUPULOUS has 1 sense:

1. without scruples or principles

  Familiarity information: UNSCRUPULOUS used as an adjective is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• UNSCRUPULOUS (adjective)

Sense 1

Meaning:

Without scruples or principles

Context example:

unscrupulous politicos who would be happy to sell...their country in order to gain power

Also:

unprincipled (lacking principles or moral scruples)

Antonym:

scrupulous (having scruples; arising from a sense of right and wrong; principled)

Derivation:

unscrupulousness (the quality of unscrupulous dishonesty)

 Context examples 

I took and furnished that house in Soho, to which Hyde was tracked by the police; and engaged as a housekeeper a creature whom I knew well to be silent and unscrupulous.

(The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson)

The Rev. Dr. Shlessinger, missionary from South America, is none other than Holy Peters, one of the most unscrupulous rascals that Australia has ever evolved—and for a young country it has turned out some very finished types.

(His Last Bow, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

Unscrupulous.

(Martin Eden, by Jack London)

She has been married three years, and believes that her position is quite secure, having shown her husband the death certificate of some man whose name she has assumed, when suddenly her whereabouts is discovered by her first husband; or, we may suppose, by some unscrupulous woman who has attached herself to the invalid.

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

He's as clever as they make 'em—a full-charged battery of force and vitality, but a quarrelsome, ill-conditioned faddist, and unscrupulous at that. He had gone the length of faking some photographs over the South American business.

(The Lost World, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

A large sum of money is at stake, for the scholarship is a very valuable one, and an unscrupulous man might very well run a risk in order to gain an advantage over his fellows.

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

That these meshes; beginning with alarming and falsified accounts of the estate of which Mr. W. is the receiver, at a period when Mr. W. had launched into imprudent and ill-judged speculations, and may not have had the money, for which he was morally and legally responsible, in hand; going on with pretended borrowings of money at enormous interest, really coming from—HEEP—and by—HEEP—fraudulently obtained or withheld from Mr. W. himself, on pretence of such speculations or otherwise; perpetuated by a miscellaneous catalogue of unscrupulous chicaneries—gradually thickened, until the unhappy Mr. W. could see no world beyond.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)