How to Use unfree in a Sentence

unfree

adjective
  • Such drama, such freedom—in so small a town, and in so unfree an age.
    Nikhil Krishnan, The New Yorker, 26 Sep. 2022
  • This is a tragedy not of the freer market that now rules liveries in New York, but of the unfree market that used to.
    James McCarthy, National Review, 30 Nov. 2020
  • Yet Posey lived in a netherworld between free and unfree.
    Washington Post, 19 Nov. 2020
  • Cuba, Nicaragua, North Korea, and Venezuela are unfree, poor, and failed states.
    Victor Davis Hanson, National Review, 7 Nov. 2019
  • In that respect, the Radicals found an Italy that was still unfree.
    Brian T. Allen, National Review, 29 Feb. 2020
  • The year this magazine was founded, 1955, was a study in contrasts — and confrontations — between the free world and the unfree world.
    Kevin D. Williamson, National Review, 3 Dec. 2020
  • There’s a lesson about the relative blunders of free and unfree societies.
    Holman W. Jenkins, WSJ, 29 Mar. 2022
  • Don’t see Europe divided between free and unfree, see the wholeness that even communism can’t take away.
    Peggy Noonan, WSJ, 6 July 2017
  • Those in unfree or otherwise wretched countries take great risks.
    Jay Nordlinger, National Review, 26 Aug. 2021
  • The leaders in these unfree nations are all taking President Biden’s measure.
    The Editorial Board, WSJ, 15 July 2021
  • Their laudable appeal to have-nots at the bottom of the pile, both free and unfree, meant that bishops had a citizen-army of pumped-up, undereducated young men ready to rid the world of sin.
    Bettany Hughes, New York Times, 8 June 2018
  • It’s been said that, with respect to China, Americans will have to choose between free trade and free markets, since China’s policy is to make markets unfree.
    Cameron Hilditch, National Review, 21 Feb. 2021
  • The human costs of pursuing the truth are horrific—scores of journalists killed every year, worldwide—but the costs of living in an unfree society are even higher.
    Sebastian Junger, Time, 17 Mar. 2022
  • Why shouldn’t unfree states be expected to work together to place themselves and like-minded regimes on a body that defines their legitimacy to their citizens and the world?
    Aaron Rhodes, WSJ, 18 Oct. 2020
  • It’s connected also to his travelling in the company of the unfree Jim, who eventually will be betrayed, captured, and locked up alone in a cabin himself, from which he is freed in the final and not-good part of the book.
    The New Yorker, 4 Apr. 2022
  • None of this is to support political relativism; the United States is not, as some dictators like to suggest, as unfree as many other countries.
    Justin Sherman, Wired, 9 June 2020
  • While the war between Ukraine and Russia is commonly depicted as a fight between the free and unfree world, prior to the war neither country was particularly free.
    Adam A. Millsap, Forbes, 6 June 2022
  • The tide is turning against illiberal regimes in the existential battle between free and unfree nations.
    J.d. Crowe | Jdcrowe@al.com, al, 1 Mar. 2022
  • Only that in a highly unfree market, consumers always get fewer choices, at higher prices.
    Michael Taylor, San Antonio Express-News, 5 Mar. 2018
  • Promoted as a society unshackled from earthly laws, this town is in fact as unfree as possible.
    Matthew R. Francis, Scientific American, 26 June 2023
  • Independent observers warn further that the new election format is unfree and unfair, adding that the result of the elections will be a rubber-stamp parliament that will be the final nail in the coffin of their democracy.
    Taylor Luck, The Christian Science Monitor, 16 Dec. 2022
  • As even Indy becomes the target of persecution at some point (in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull), the films allude to the complex realities of scholarship in unfree societies.
    Petar Parvanov, Smithsonian Magazine, 3 July 2023
  • Even those devising a respectable philosophical pedigree for the free world ignored much that was happening and had happened in the supposedly unfree world.
    Pankaj Mishra, The New York Review of Books, 21 Oct. 2020
  • The fact that the nation began there, built its prosperity off Southern land and unfree labor, and also the genocidal relationship to Indigenous people that becomes a way of doing things.
    Los Angeles Times, 20 Jan. 2022
  • Yet, while troubling, mass surveillance did not prompt most Americans to think that their country had become fundamentally unfree.
    Stephen Wertheim, The New Yorker, 1 Oct. 2020
  • The Soviet Union killed millions in famine and the Gulag prison camps, deported millions of members of ethnic minority groups from their homes, and kept Europe divided and unfree for two generations.
    The New York Times, New York Times, 30 Dec. 2022
  • While most Africans were unfree laborers, some exercised liberties that later would be unthinkable.
    Drew Gilpin Faust, The Atlantic, 18 July 2019
  • In the 1600s, fluid settler Colonial societies composed of unfree African and European labor gradually hardened into a regime of brutal racial slavery.
    Wendell Nii Laryea Adjetey, Twin Cities, 28 July 2019
  • But in many unfree countries, dictatorships and autocracies, the government reported the economy growing much faster than nighttime light.
    Josh Zumbrun, WSJ, 20 Jan. 2023
  • Slavery made colonial Virginia prosperous, creating a plantation society founded on tobacco production, social and economic stratification, and unfree labor.
    Drew Gilpin Faust, The Atlantic, 18 July 2019

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'unfree.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Last Updated: