Imbalanced or unbalanced?
imbalanced is an adjective meaning “Experiencing an imbalance; out of balance”; unbalanced is an adjective meaning “not balanced, without equilibrium”. In written English (wordfreq, 2021 data) unbalanced is about 6.0 times as common as imbalanced.
What is the difference between imbalanced and unbalanced?
| imbalanced | unbalanced | |
|---|---|---|
| Part of speech | adjective | adjective, verb |
| Meaning | Experiencing an imbalance; out of balance | not balanced, without equilibrium irrational or mentally deranged |
| Example | none recorded | unbalanced reporting |
| Pronunciation | not recorded | not recorded |
| In writing | about once in every 4 million words | 1.6 times per million words |
Sources: imbalanced and unbalanced in the English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0); written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).
Every current meaning of imbalanced and unbalanced
imbalanced
- 1
Experiencing an imbalance; out of balance
unbalanced
- 1
not balanced, without equilibrium
- 2
irrational or mentally deranged
- 3
expressing support for a certain point of view; biased
unbalanced reporting
- 4
not adjusted such that debit and credit correspond
- 5
of an expression having different numbers of left and right parentheses
- 6
an offensive line with more players on one side of the center than on the other
Source: the English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0); obsolete, archaic, dialect and rare senses left out.
Which is more common, imbalanced or unbalanced?
imbalanced appears about once in every 4 million words; unbalanced 1.6 times per million words.
imbalanced about once in every 4 million wordsunbalanced 1.6 times per million words
Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).
How many people search imbalanced vs unbalanced?
“imbalanced vs unbalanced” is searched about 1,600 times a month on Google and 20 on Bing in the United States. Google counts close variants of a query together (“unbalanced vs imbalanced”, “imbalanced or unbalanced”).
Sources: Google Ads keyword data through DataForSEO and Microsoft Advertising keyword data through DataForSEO, the average month from September 2025 to August 2026.