unperson
unperson noun: a person who has been stripped of rights, identity, or humanity.
Noun
unperson (plural unpersons or unpeople)
- A person who has been stripped of rights, identity, or humanity.
- With his identity stolen, he became an unperson, unable to prove his existence to the government.
- In accordance with the change in the party line, Stalin vanished from the play, disappearing even before Mr. Krushchev's denunciation at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party. Stalin became an “unperson,” in the terminology of George Orwell's “1984”.1965 February 25, Harrison E. Salisbury, “Kremlin Chimes' Banished Stalin”, in The New York Times, →ISSN, archived from the original on 01 Nov 2021
Verb
unperson (third-person singular simple present unpersons, present participle unpersoning, simple past and past participle unpersoned)
- To strip (a person) of rights, identity, or humanity; to dehumanize.
- Unhappily, shortcomings here on the part of even a few schools provide a handle for the type of irresponsible generalization that recently labeled the lay professor on the Catholic campus "unwanted, unpaid, uncared for and unpersoned."1958 May 3, anonymous author, “Lay Professors in Catholic Colleges”, in America, volume 99, number 5, →ISSN, page 160
- Could a decision in the clinic’s favor today mean that, in that future, the lab-gestated babies would be legally unpersoned, because the womb had been held to impart a worth the child did not have on its own?2024, Leah Libresco Sargeant, “Embryos as Schrödinger’s Persons”, in The New Atlantis, number 76, Center for the Study of Technology and Society, →ISSN, page 41
Forms of unperson
| Noun | |
|---|---|
| plural | unpersons |
| plural | unpeople |
| Verb | |
| third-person singular present | unpersons |
| present participle | unpersoning |
| past participle | unpersoned |
| past | unpersoned |
Origin of unperson
From un- + person. Coined by George Orwell in 1949 as part of the Newspeak in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, where it refers to a person who has been executed or has fallen out of favor; whose entire history has been erased.
Questions about unperson
- What does unperson mean?
- Unperson means a person who has been stripped of rights, identity, or humanity.
- What part of speech is unperson?
- Unperson can be a noun or a verb.
- What is the plural of unperson?
- The plural of unperson is unpersons.
Words near unperson in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: unperson (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
Last updated:
Cite this entry: “unperson.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/unperson. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.