unfettered

adjective

un·​fet·​tered ˌən-ˈfe-tərd 

: not controlled or restricted : free, unrestrained

unfettered access to the Senate.

—Joshua Miller

… an approach to reading which combined passion and empathy with free-ranging enthusiasm and unfettered curiosity.

—Jonathan Keates

If popular government is about anything, it is about the unfettered right of the voters to choose their leaders.

—Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

… few voices in modern American intellectual life have challenged the primacy of the unfettered individual.

—Walter Shapiro

Did you know?

A fetter is a chain or shackle for the feet (such as the kind sometimes used on a prisoner), or, more broadly, anything that confines or restrains. Fetter and unfetter both function as verbs in English with contrasting literal meanings having to do with the putting on of and freeing from fetters; they likewise have contrasting figurative extensions having to do with the depriving and granting of freedom. The adjective unfettered resides mostly in the figurative, with the word typically describing someone or something unrestrained in progress or spirit. This is how Irish author James Joyce used the word in his 1916 autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man when the character of Cranly recalls to his best friend Stephen what he (Stephen) said he wishes to do in life: "To discover the mode of life or of art whereby your spirit could express itself in unfettered freedom."

Examples of unfettered in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

For years, its housing crisis worsened because of policy failures and unfettered local control. —Alena Botros, Fortune, 17 Apr. 2024

Still, the idea that American drivers, long used to unfettered access to a continent-spanning road system, would accept paying a toll to enter downtown zones seems foreign, which is why cities are watching New York’s experiment with congestion pricing. —Hillary Chura, The Christian Science Monitor, 2 Apr. 2024

As children have more and more unfettered access to the internet in the digital age, predators – which increasingly include other children – have more opportunities to groom and exploit unsuspecting kids, experts told Fox News Digital. —Christina Coulter, Fox News, 29 Mar. 2024

James Provost Of course, allowing unfettered modding of the K5’s transceiver does raise the possibility of abuse. —IEEE Spectrum, 27 Mar. 2024

Kassis considers the notion of unfettered hospitality inherent to her identity as a Palestinian. —Hannah Goldfield, The New Yorker, 18 Mar. 2024

But that kind of unfettered honesty means Sevigny risks colliding with a media world that doesn’t do nuance. —Brent Lang, Variety, 13 Mar. 2024

Still, when Stone grasped her Oscar, the distance between the unfettered potential of her character and the constraints still bedeviling women in real life couldn’t have been more dramatic. —Ann Hornaday, Washington Post, 11 Mar. 2024

In it, Lee framed herself as a whistleblower sounding the alarm about unfettered abuses of open records laws in the weeks after Price barred a reporter from attending a press conference late last year. —Jakob Rodgers, The Mercury News, 5 Mar. 2024

Word History

First Known Use

1602, in the meaning defined above

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