Definition of "unread"

At first, perhaps, unread your Note’s return’d, / Your Person slighted, and your Passion scorn’d.

1700, Charles Hopkins, The Art of Love, (after Ovid’s Ars Amatoria), London: Joseph Wild, “The Muse,” p. 36

‘PRIVATE: for the hands of J. G. Utterson ALONE and in case of his predecease to be destroyed unread,’ so it was emphatically superscribed; and the lawyer dreaded to behold the contents.

1886 January 5, Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, London: Longmans, Green, and Co.

In fortune’s love […] the bold and coward,The wise and fool, the artist and unread,The hard and soft seem all affined and kin:But, in the wind and tempest of her frown,Distinction, with a broad and powerful fan,Puffing at all, winnows the light away;

c. 1602, William Shakespeare, “The Tragedie of Troylus and Cressida”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, [Act I, scene iii]

The only child of two doating parents, she never had been taught the necessity of resignation—untutored, unread, unused to reflect, but knowing how to feel […]

1796, Elizabeth Inchbald, Nature and Art, Dublin: P. Wogan et al., Chapter 22, p. 111

[…] only those unread in the biography of genius imagine themselves to be original.

1890, Frances Willard, Address before the Seventeenth Convention of the World Woman’s Christian Temperance Union at Atlanta, Georgia, in William Jennings Bryan (editor), The World’s Famous Orations, New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1906, Volume 10, p. 162

You will have fewer 'Unreads' staring at you from your Inbox, and will feel—and be—more productive.

2011, Hugh D. Culver, Give Me a Break: The Art of Making Time Work for You, page 129

I flipped from the calendar app to the email app and logged in to view Cooper's. The unreads were staggering; I'd have to triage them later.

2022, Michelle McCraw, Boss Me