Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • Not to be forgiven; incapable of being pardoned or remitted: as, an unpardonable insult.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • adjective Not admitting of pardon or forgiveness; inexcusable.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • adjective impossible to pardon; impossible to excuse or justify

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • adjective not admitting of pardon

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

See un- and pardon.

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Examples

  • Constantine University in eastern Algeria, in which he admitted to what he described as unpardonable past crimes by France in Algeria.

    ANC Daily News Briefing 2008

  • -- ` Well, 'he went on, ` just you look in the Bible, and you'll find that there's what they call the unpardonable sin -- there's no forgiveness for those who've been guilty of it; and if there's truth in that Bible, there's no forgiveness for you, for you've been the biggest blasphemer against the Bible in Crossbourne.'

    True to his Colours The Life that Wears Best Theodore P. Wilson

  • I had paid was the least he could do to repair the result of what he called his unpardonable carelessness.

    Martin Hewitt, Investigator Arthur Morrison 1904

  • Mamma would be greatly delighted whenever she caught him red-handed in the sin, which he continued to call the unpardonable sin, of snobbery.

    Swann's Way 2003

  • Mamma would be greatly delighted whenever she caught him red-handed in the sin, which he continued to call the unpardonable sin, of snobbery.

    Swann's Way Marcel Proust 1896

  • I am sorry to say that the Pretenderette dropped the wicker cage containing the parrot into the sea -- an unpardonable piece of cruelty and revenge; unpardonable, that is, unless you consider that she did not really know any better.

    The Magic City 1891

  • Some of his former Radical friends and associates especially denounce in no measured terms his unpardonable heresy in departing from what they consider was his old political path.

    A Tale of One City: the New Birmingham Papers Reprinted from the "Midland Counties Herald" Thomas Anderton 1869

  • Never was peace endangered between his mother and him, except when she chanced to make use of some evil maxim which she thought experience had taught her, and the look her son cast upon her stung her to the heart, making her for a moment feel as if she had sinned what the theologians call the unpardonable sin.

    Mary Marston George MacDonald 1864

  • He stirs up indignation when he places baseness where it is quite unpardonable, that is in the case of men who are expected to show fine moral sense.

    Aesthetical Essays of Frederich Schiller Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller 1782

  • He stirs up indignation when he places baseness where it is quite unpardonable, that is in the case of men who are expected to show fine moral sense.

    The Works of Frederich Schiller Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller 1782

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