unsustainable

adjectiveC1Rare in speech; mostly a word you read · #14,308 of 15,258leans written

Unsustainable means impossible to keep going at the present rate. An unsustainable pace.

It says nothing about whether the thing is good, only that it cannot last. Anything unsustainable stops eventually, which is the only certainty the word carries.

Definitions of unsustainable

1adjectiveunsustainableImpossible to keep going at the present rate.C1
“The whole level of borrowing was unsustainable by the third year.”

unsustainable is a quality.

Where it comes from

From un- + sustainable.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

unsustainable in the wild

To be considered for the initiative, countries must face an unsustainable debt burden that cannot be managed with traditional means.
Heavily indebted poor countries
Human activities are often the main cause, such as unsustainable land management practices.
Land degradation
The last edition of the newspaper was printed on 7 January 2010, the last front-page editorial quoting unsustainable mounting losses coupled with a general economic recession.
Ziua
Unsustainable fishing methods refers to the use of various fishing methods to capture or harvest fish at a rate that is unsustainable for fish populations.
Unsustainable fishing methods
The company said that the newspaper had become "unsustainable".
Metro Herald (Irish newspaper)

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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