UNWRITTEN • DICTIONARY ONE.COM • Definition of Unwritten

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/ənrˈɪtən/ Listen

Unwritten

adjective

Based on custom rather than documentation. "Rites...so ancient that they well might have had their unwritten origins in Aurignacian times"

Using speech rather than writing. Synonym: oral. "An oral agreement"

Said or done without having been planned or written in advance. Synonyms: ad-lib, spontaneous.

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"Unwritten" Quotes from Famous Books

... she had been taught, her father was in heaven already. It was not possible that any human being should obey every written and unwritten ordinance of his religion more strictly than he had done ever since she could remember him. He had been severe, almost to cruelty, but he had been quite as unyieldingly austere in dealing with himself. He had fasted ...

— The White Sister • F. Marion Crawford

... places) much among the islands; and after a Cape Horn passage with its snow-squalls and its frozen sheets, he announced his intention of "taking a turn among them Kanakas." I thought I should have lost him soon; but, according to the unwritten usage of mariners, he had first to dissipate his wages. "Guess I'll have to paint this town red," was his hyperbolical expression; for sure no man ever embarked upon a milder course of dissipation, most of his days being passed in ...

— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... redress, perhaps even no cause of complaint. I know how subordinates in business are turned away to suit the convenience, or at the whim, of their superiors; but in most colleges there is a sort of unwritten law that promotion shall follow efficient service. As a rule, the one year appointment is merely a safeguard to protect the institution from a man ...

— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins

... is the collision between the individual will, impulse, or action, and society in some form of its organisation, or those unwritten laws of life which we call the laws of God. The tragic character is always a lawbreaker, but not always a criminal; he is, indeed, often the servant of a new idea which sets him, as in the case of Giordano Bruno, in opposition to an established order of knowledge; he is ...

— Books and Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie

... rang out a high, clear voice. It was the voice of the new member. Inadvertently he was recognized and had the floor. There was a little more "senatorial courtesy" then than now in deliberative bodies, and one of the unwritten laws of the Virginia Legislature was that no member during his first session should make an extended speech or take an active part in ...

— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard

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