Dictionary

unprompted en · ADJ

Etymology

From un- + prompted.

Meanings

1. Not prompted; not urged or instigated; spontaneous.
   • Donald Trump’s frequently bizarre public appearances, which this month have seen the president claim, wrongly, that his uncle knew the Unabomber and rant unprompted about windmills on his recent trip to the UK, have once again raised questions about his mental acuity, experts say. 2025 August 3, Adam Gabbatt, “‘He has trouble completing a thought’: bizarre public appearances again cast doubt on Trump’s mental acuity”, in The Guardian, →ISSN:
   • "Seven years," he confirms. "Nobody else has done more than four. The job has been wonderfully rewarding, but very full-on. There hasn't been a lot of time in my life for normal things. I needed to find a better balance." Unprompted, he dives straight into the obvious question: having told everyone he intended to be the last chief executive of Network Rail, why the change of heart? 2025 September 17, Paul Clifton, “"You don't get the luxury of self-pity in this job, because the machine is continuing to churn problems at me" says Sir Andrew Haines”, in RAIL, number 1044, page 28:
   • We observed occasional expressions of negative self-image, though these were mild and typically arose in response to task failures or perceived missteps rather than arising unprompted. 2026 February 14, Anthropic, System Card: Claude Opus 4.6:
   • The unprompted, rapid, and reliable emergence of hierarchical relationships within human social groups (Gruenfeld & Tiedens, 2010; Leavitt, 2005) means that differences in social status exist in perhaps all human social environments (Anderson & Kilduff, 2009; Gould, 2002; Ridgeway, 1991). 2018 December, Nathan Betancourt, Balázs Kovács, Sarah M. G. Otner, “The perception of status: How we infer the status of others from their social relationships”, in Network Science, volume 6, number 3, →DOI:

Forms

Deriveds

unpromptedly

Synonyms

unstimulated

Translations (5)

fr spontané (not prompted) · bg неподсказан (not prompted) · no uoppfordret (not prompted) · fi oma-aloitteinen (not prompted) · bg спонтанен (not prompted)