Impartial means favouring no side, and perfectly fair. An impartial judge, impartial advice, strictly impartial.
It is a requirement rather than a virtue in some roles: judges, referees and broadcasters are held to impartiality as a duty, and the BBC's charter obligation to it is argued about constantly. Impartial is about having no side, where objective is about having no bias in method — related but not the same. Note impartiality; and partial, which means both incomplete and biased.
1adjectiveimpartialFavouring no side, and perfectly fair.
“A referee must stay impartial, even when his home team is playing.”
synonyms: unbiased, neutral
impartial is a quality of fairness.
Also accepted in games: neutral, unbiased
Middle French impartial is in- plus partial, from Latin pars, a part. To be partial is to take a part or side, so to be impartial is to take none.
Middle French
impartial
English, today
impartial
Borrowed from Middle French impartial. See im- + partial.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA