- 1未出生的、腹中的（胎兒）。醫療場合說「未出世的孩子」；法律或社會議題上 the unborn 指「未出生者」這個群體。
Unborn means not yet born — still inside the mother. It goes in front of a noun almost all the time: an unborn child, an unborn baby. You would not normally say 'the baby is unborn', which sounds strange; you would say 'the baby isn't born yet'. That front-of-the-noun habit is the main thing to learn about it. It is a serious, slightly formal word, and you will meet it most in three places: in medicine and health advice (smoking can harm your unborn child), in law and (arguments about the rights of the unborn — where 'the unborn' with 'the' means all of them as a group), and in writing about the future, where 'unborn generations' means the people who will live after we are all gone. That last use is a bit literary and old-fashioned in feel. There is no everyday version of this word; in ordinary conversation people simply say 'she's pregnant' or 'before the baby was born'.
From the word’s history
From Old English unboren; un- + born.
源自古英文 unboren，就是 un-「未」加 born「出生」。
組成un- + born. This is the 'not' un-, not the 'undo it' un- — nobody can undo being born. Born is the old past participle of bear, in bear's older meaning of 'carry, and carry a child'. The word runs straight back through Middle English unborn to Old English unboren, so it has been in the language, in this shape, for over a thousand years.
原始詞典資料5 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，摘錄並精簡格式，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
unbornadj
- 1
Not yet born; yet to come; future.
- 2
Not yet delivered; still existing in the mother's womb.
- Ellen Page gives a star-making performance as a 16-year-old live wire who decides to go through with her pregnancy and seeks acceptably well-adjusted, wealthy, punk-rock loving parents for the unborn baby.
- 3
Existing without birth or beginning.
unbornnoun
- 1
A single unborn offspring at any stage of gestation.
- Whereas the lack of a child brings shame upon Anna and Joachim, the converse holds true for Mary: the existence of an unborn in the womb of a woman who is supposed to be a virgin causes great scandal.
- 2
Unborn offspring collectively.
- Inheritance law allows property to be left to the unborn.
摘錄自 英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary，已精簡格式；依 CC BY-SA 4.0 授權使用，改動後的內容同樣以此授權提供。