MEANING
1. Lacking personal warmth or features that make people feel individually recognized or involved.
2. Not directed at a particular person or based on personal relationships or preferences.
3. Using a grammatical subject that does not refer to a particular person or thing.
Use it for
describing detached institutional communication; examining a tone that distances speaker and audience; distinguishing efficiency from personal responsivenessSeparates lack of warmth, person-independent treatment, and a grammatical construction. Academic functions: Analysis / Interpretation, Research / Methodology.
Words that belong together
- impersonal tone
- impersonal service
- impersonal environment
On the page
The interviewees describe the process as efficient but impersonal.
The critic links the report’s impersonal tone to its exclusion of individual testimony.
The comparison asks whether allocation follows impersonal rules or personal connections.
The economist describes market pressures as impersonal forces without denying that people experience their effects differently.
In “It is raining,” the subject belongs to an impersonal construction rather than referring to an object.
Nearby words
Word forms
- Base
- impersonal
Usage notes
Adjective: impersonal process or tone; impersonal verb. More impersonal and most impersonal are natural for tone, not usually for a grammatical category. Register: neutral. Commonness: moderately common (qualitative editorial estimate, informed by dictionaries/corpus).
Practice this word in a sentenceYour margin notes
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