unprecedently

English

Etymology

From un- +‎ precedent +‎ -ly.

Adverb

unprecedently (comparative more unprecedently, superlative most unprecedently)

  1. In a manner or to a degree that has no precedent.
    • 1916, W. Grant Hague, M.D., The Eugenic Marriage, Volume I. (of IV.)‎[1]:
      Despite the fact that these women were starved and badly clad and deprived of the comforts of home, the death rate of the infants dropped steadily to an unprecedently low mark.
    • 1963, Robert S. Elegant, “The Rich Impoverished, the Poor Starving”, in The Centre of the World: Communism and the Mind of China‎[2], London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., →OCLC, page 51:
      Chingchou Prefecture, comprising several counties in Hupei Province, suffered a disastrous three years, and its tribulations were not unique. Massive floods rolled over one county in 1830, drowning hundreds of thousands and befouling the rice fields with sand. The dikes restraining the Yangtze River collapsed in a neighbouring county in 1831 and half the population starved to death. In 1832, the prefectural capital suffered a severe famine while, elsewhere in Chingchou, cholera struck down tens of thousands and the normal autumnal floods were unprecedently severe.
    • 1979 March 3 [1979 March 2], Leonid I. Brezhnev, quotee, “BREZHNEV CONDEMNS CHINESE, BUT VOICES NO MILITARY THREAT”, in The New York Times‎[3], sourced from Moscow, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 21 March 2025, page 1‎[4]:
      The 72‐year‐old Mr. Brezhnev, speaking in the Kremlin's Palace of Congresses, reserved his toughest language for the Chinese, whose invasion of Vietnam began Feb. 17. He called it an “unprecedently brazen bandit attack” in which the Chinese rulers “revealed fully to the whole world the perfidious, aggressive essence of the great‐power policy pursued by them.”
    • 1987 January 11 [1987 January 10], Mikhail Gorbachev, quotee, “GORBACHEV SAYS WASHINGTON IGNORED HIS INITIATIVES”, in The Washington Post‎[5], sourced from Washington Post Foreign Service, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 21 March 2025‎[6]:
      In a letter to U.N. Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar, Gorbachev said that although it produced no practical results, the Reykjavik summit had at least raised the cause of nuclear disarmament to "an unprecedently high plateau."
    • For more quotations using this term, see Citations:unprecedently.

Further reading

This article is issued from Wiktionary. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.