Written, but never made public — never printed in a book or magazine, never put where readers can find it. Two quite different feelings hang on this one word. For a writer it can mean failure or waiting: an unpublished novelist is someone whose work nobody has bought yet, and "three unpublished novels in a drawer" is a small sad story in four words. But for scholars, letters, and famous people's papers, unpublished means rare and precious: "previously unpublished letters", "unpublished photographs of the singer". Here it is a selling point, because unpublished means nobody has seen it before. It also has a plain technical use for information a company or government holds but has not released — unpublished data, unpublished figures. Grammar note: it can describe the writing (an unpublished poem) or the person (an unpublished author). One quiet change: since anyone can now post writing online, "unpublished" in the book world tends to mean "not published by a publisher" rather than "never seen by anyone".