Word.ws English Dictionary

How to use unreliable in a sentence

32 example sentences · adjective, noun

Unreliable means not reliable. Example: “They say he is a poor judge of character considering all the unreliable friends he has made.”

Examples of unreliable by meaning

adjectiveNot reliable.

  • Tell one another whether any one of you has ever heard me discuss such questions briefly or at length; and then you will realize that the other popular reports about me are equally unreliable.1954, Plato, translated by Hugh Tredennick, “Socrates on Trial: The Apology”, in The Last Days of Socrates (Penguin Classics)...
  • The opposite issue emerges in the summer when students face scorching temperatures with unreliable or nonexistent air conditioning.2018 January 4, Janie Tankard Carnock, “Frigid Baltimore City schools: The racism we haven’t confronted”, in CNN
  • "Operating the WCML at this intensity makes it challenging to maintain acceptable performance levels, resulting in a frustratingly unreliable service for passengers.2020 May 6, Philip Haigh, “Just one more stop on the long journey to HS2 fulfillment [sic]”, in Rail, page 65

More sentences with unreliable

  • They say he is a poor judge of character considering all the unreliable friends he has made.From the entry judge
  • Military secrets should not be entrusted to unreliable private individuals.From the entry private
  • The storyline in the film “The Usual Suspects” is presented from the point of view of an unreliable narrator.From the entry point of view
  • Meyer, Laurence, Secondi), but iis unreliable (Critchett, Mooren), leads in half the cases to phthisis bulbe (Ed.2023, Carl Stellwag, Treatise on the Diseases of the Eye, page 302. From the entry cyclitic
  • But what is a guilty person's complaint against an unreliable procedure?2017, Edward P. Stringham, Anarchy and the Law: The Political Economy of Choice. From the entry mispunish
  • That would only make sense if the grid power were persistently unreliable, which it isn't.2011 February 25, Sylvia Else, “Not earthing a generator”, in aus.electronics (Usenet). From the entry suicide cable
  • Russian officers complain that such “contractniki” are highly unreliable in battle and badly disciplined.2000, Pavel Felgenhauer, “Russian Strategy in the Chechnya Wars”, in Walter Feichtinger, editor, Parameter bewaffneter Konflikte (Studien…. From the entry contractnik
  • Warehousing was vital in a time when storms, poor harvests and wars made supplies unreliable.1999, Geert Mak, translated by Philipp Blom, Amsterdam: A Brief Life of the City, Vintage, published 2001, page 90. From the entry warehousing
  • The moral to this anomaly may be that Zeitgeister are unreliable because afflicted with tunnel vision.1977, Joseph Chamberlain Furnas, Stormy Weather: Crosslights on the Nineteen Thirties: An Informal Social History of the United States…. From the entry zeitgeister
  • A spokesperson for VARS Technology said: “We completely refute the suggestion that our market-leading ANPR system is unreliable".2025 December 20, Taro Kaneko, “Family ‘banned from more than 1,000 petrol stations’ amid fuel theft row”, in The Guardian. From the entry refute
  • Most likely Concordance's geas against artificial modification was left over from some earlier age when the tech was unreliable, dangerous.2020, Simon Kewin, The Triple Stars Trilogy: the complete box set, Stormcrow Books. From the entry geas
  • In Toronto, we have underserviced neighbourhoods, subsidized routes into the city's fringes, and unreliable service in the core.2009 February 7, Lynda Hurst, “Should we limit family size to save the Earth?”, in Toronto Star. From the entry underserviced
  • Tenants have complained for years that the elevators are unsafe and unreliable, often stalling midfloor or refusing to work at all.2009 February 7, Ray Rivera, “New York Documents Show Elevator Mechanics Caught Skipping Work”, in New York Times. From the entry midfloor
  • Sports economists tend to throw cold water on such studies, saying they often rely on unreliable or exaggerated data.2008 January 15, Don Walker, “Forget the wind chill. How 'bout that windfall?: With the Packers' season in double overtime, Brown County…. From the entry throw cold water on
  • Broaddrick had been adjudged unreliable by the FBI.2000, Christopher Hitchens, No One Left to Lie to: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton. From the entry sinuous
  • Nowhere else is the mean or unreliable horse so utterly unendurable, even for a day, as about a circus.1904 January, “Breaking Horses”, in Saddlery and Harness, volume 13, page 21. From the entry balking
  • However, in environments in which rewards are uncertain, such as when experimenters are unreliable, eating the single marshmallow right away may be beneficial.2020, Joseph Cesario, David J. Johnson, Heather L. Eisthen, “Your Brain Is Not an Onion With a Tiny Reptile Inside”, in Current Directions…. From the entry impulsivity
  • So, on average, an unreliable outlet’s headline has a higher chance of receiving more clicks or attention than a reliable outlet’s headline.2019, Sameer Dhoju, Md Main Uddin Rony, Muhammad Ashad Kabir, Naeemul Hassan, “A Large-Scale Analysis of Health Journalism by Reliable and…. From the entry clickbaitiness
  • Simply put, an unreliable narrator is one whose version of events runs counter to the story's true actions and to readers' interpretation of those events.2011, Judy Doenges, “The Truthless Narrator”, in Andrea Barrett, Peter Turchi, editors, A Kite in the Wind: Fiction Writers on Their…. From the entry unreliable narrator
  • Parental time with children is one area in which data reported in stylized (nondiary) form are considered unreliable because of a strong social desirability bias.2004, James S. House, A Telescope on Society. From the entry nondiary
  • The unreliable narrator demonstrates how the spirit of the times colours the work of storytellers, and how they in turn help to shape that spirit.1999, Robert Fulford, “The Cracked Mirror of Modernity”, in The Triumph of Narrative: Storytelling in the Age of Mass Culture (CBC Massey…. From the entry unreliable narrator
  • After Manuel's death, the actual number of ships and sailors under the megaduke had declined significantly, and the sailors tended to consist of unreliable foreigners.1987, John V. A. Fine, Jr., The Late Medieval Balkans: A Critical Survey from the Late Twelfth Century to the Ottoman Conquest, page 35. From the entry megaduke
  • The Priest also places a moral barrier between himself and his tale by establishing himself as an "unreliable narrator" capable of deception and irony.1969 September, Charles A. Watkins, “Chaucer’s Sweete Preest”, in Earl R. Wasserman et al., editors, ELH [English Literary History]…. From the entry deception
  • A shifty or unreliable politician may hide their mendacity behind deceit, fabrication on confabulation, or by rehearsed counter-attack that simply ignores the questions but makes imputations against the other.2019 March 23, Jack Waterford, “Prime Minister's ever-diminishing credibility”, in The Canberra Times, Canberra. From the entry mendacity
  • Yet, with full ECN nonce functionality and totally unreliable behaviour, ACKing individual packets only would require the receiver to maintain state that could theoretically grow without bounds.2005, Michael Welzl, Network Congestion Control: Managing Internet Traffic, page 150. From the entry ack
  • The no-fly list created by U.S. authorities, which singles out passengers who are potential terrorist threats, is the target of frequent criticism that it's incomplete and unreliable.2005 April 18, Timothy J. Burger, “Extending the No-Fly Zone”, in Time. From the entry no-fly list
  • We hope to have provoked some response on our criticism but also to have comforted some users in that undebuggability and unreliable results are not only their own fault.1993, Peter Desain, Henkjan Honing, “Conclusion”, in Array, volume 13, numbers 1–3, page 18, column 3. From the entry undebuggability
  • This, however, could lead to an even greater loss of prestige——to "Carterization," to use the now fashionable definition of an indecisive president with an unreliable policy.1982, USSR Report: USA, economics, politics, ideology, numbers 4-6, page 48. From the entry Carterization
  • Many of these submissions were deleted for not having “an oniony quality” (seeming more like satire than news, not just a funny title) or being from an unreliable news source.2019 January 29, Dawn Graham, “Fake news or not? Using natural language processing to identify articles”, in Towards Data Science…. From the entry oniony

Meaning of unreliable

  1. adjective Not reliable.
  2. noun One who or that which cannot be relied upon.

Full definition of unreliable

Questions about unreliable in a sentence

How do you use unreliable in a sentence?
Unreliable is used as an adjective and noun. For example: “They say he is a poor judge of character considering all the unreliable friends he has made.”
What is a short sentence with unreliable?
“Broaddrick had been adjudged unreliable by the FBI.”
What does unreliable mean?
Unreliable means not reliable.

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: unreliable (page history and authors) and the entries each sentence comes from. Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the sentences, left out offensive ones and quotations older than 1900, and marked the word in each. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this page: “How to use unreliable in a sentence.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/sentences/unreliable. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.