unauthorized

adjectiveB2Common in everyday speech and writing · #5,567 of 15,258neutralformal · an editor’s judgement

Unauthorized means done without official permission. Somebody should have said yes, and nobody did.

It appears on signs and in policies constantly, so unauthorized access, unauthorized absence and unauthorized use are all standard formulas, and each is a warning rather than a description. Computing uses it for security, and unauthorized access to a system is a criminal offence in most countries. This is the American spelling with a z, and British English usually writes it with an s, though both are widely accepted.

Definitions of unauthorized

1adjectiveunauthorizedDone without official permission or approval.B2
“The sign warns against unauthorized entry.”

Also accepted in games: unauthorised

Where it comes from

From un- + authorized.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Man Called Ove

First appears in chapter 2 of A Man Called Ove.

Practise this word

unauthorized in the wild

A hacker is most commonly a person who seeks unauthorized access to a computer system or network.
Hacker
At MIT, hacking ranged from playful technical work and pranks to unauthorized interference.
Hacker
In 2022, 37% of unauthorized immigrants were from Mexico, the smallest share on record.
Illegal immigration to the United States
As of 2016, approximately two-thirds of unauthorized adult immigrants had lived in the US for at least a decade.
Illegal immigration to the United States
An unauthorized biography, sometimes called a kiss-and-tell, or a tell-all, is a biography written without the subject's permission or input.
Unauthorized biography

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

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