1
see usage paragraph below
: not carrying, staffed, or performed by people : not manned
an unmanned railroad crossing
unmanned spaceflight
2
of a hawk
: not trained
Usage of Manned and Unmanned
While manned and unmanned are still commonly used in news sources to describe spaceflights, NASA has since the early 21st century used and prescribed non-gender-specific terms, preferring such descriptors as human, piloted, and crewed for the former, and unpiloted and uncrewed for the latter.
Examples of unmanned in a Sentence
Recent Examples on the Web
Warsaw determined the unmanned aerial vehicles to be of Russian origin, having coincided with a massive attack against various sites in western Ukraine, which also borders Poland.
—
Tom O'Connor, MSNBC Newsweek, 17 Sep. 2025
By 2023, China had more than 2,000 drone manufacturers and over 20,000 companies operating unmanned aerial vehicles, according to the Communist Party-run media People’s Daily.
—John Liu, CNN Money, 17 Sep. 2025
That’s why the entire system consists of an unmanned service boat with a dinghy, a drone, a small underwater search robot and the TUM diving robot.
—Georgina Jedikovska, Interesting Engineering, 17 Sep. 2025
Pokrovsk remains under daily pressure, but Ukraine’s effective use of unmanned systems has limited Russia’s ability to advance.
—David Kirichenko, Forbes.com, 15 Sep. 2025
See All Example Sentences for unmanned
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Tom O'Connor, MSNBC Newsweek, 17 Sep. 2025
By 2023, China had more than 2,000 drone manufacturers and over 20,000 companies operating unmanned aerial vehicles, according to the Communist Party-run media People’s Daily.
—John Liu, CNN Money, 17 Sep. 2025
That’s why the entire system consists of an unmanned service boat with a dinghy, a drone, a small underwater search robot and the TUM diving robot.
—Georgina Jedikovska, Interesting Engineering, 17 Sep. 2025
Pokrovsk remains under daily pressure, but Ukraine’s effective use of unmanned systems has limited Russia’s ability to advance.
—David Kirichenko, Forbes.com, 15 Sep. 2025
See All Example Sentences for unmanned
Cite this Entry
“Unmanned.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/unmanned. Accessed 23 Sep. 2025.
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unmanned
adjective
un·manned
ˌən-ˈmand 
ˈən-
: having no crew aboard
an unmanned spacecraft
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