I’m a little surprised that I’ve been blogging for almost five years now and never got around to talking about whether there’s a difference between the words disinterested and uninterested. I suppose I’ve avoided it because the matter has already been excellently discussed by many others, and I didn’t think I needed to add my voice to that choir. But now it’s become something of a glaring omission in my mind, so it’s time to fix that.
Let’s skip to the end and fill in the middle later: there is a difference, but in Mark Liberman’s words, it’s “emergent and incomplete, rather than traditional and under siege”. For some people, there’s a clean separation, for others an overlap. In the language in general, uninterested is limited to the “unconcerned” meaning, while disinterested can mean either “unconcerned” or “unbiased”.
How do two distinct meanings arise from such similar words? The problem lies at the root — namely, interest, which can be with (1a) or without (1b) bias:
(1a) I espouse a relatively dull orthodox Christianity and my interest in Buddhism is strictly cultural, aesthetic.
(1b) Upon consignment of your car, it’s in my interest to do everything possible to present your car to potential buyers.
So, when one adds a negative prefix to interest(ed), is it merely disavowing concern, or bias as well? I don’t know of any inherent difference between dis- and un- that would solve that question, and historically, no one else seemed to either. Though I don’t have relative usage statistics, the Oxford English Dictionary cites both forms with both meanings early in their history:
(2a) How dis-interested are they of all Worldly matters, since they fling their Wealth and Riches into the Sea. [c1677-1684]
(2b) The soul‥sits now as the most disinterested Arbiter, and impartial judge of her own works, that she can be. [1659]
(2c) He is no cold, uninterested, and uninteresting advocate for the cause he espouses. [1722]
(2d) What think you of uninterested Men, who value the Publick Good beyond their own private Interest? [1709]
But we both know that it’s no longer the 18th century, and I strongly suspect that you find (2d) to be a bit odd. The OED agrees, and marks this meaning (uninterested as “unbiased”) as obsolete. I looked over the first 50 examples of uninterested in COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English) as well and found no examples like (2d). If it still exists, it’s rare or dialectal. Uninterested meaning “unconcerned” (2c) is, of course, alive and well.
So really, it’s not a question of whether people are confusing uninterested and disinterested, but rather a question of whether disinterested has two possible meanings. We’re certainly told that they are, and that it is imperative that disinterested be kept separate. For instance:
“The constant misuse of disinterested for uninterested is breaking down a very useful distinction of meaning.”
Is it really? Suppose disinterested could just as easily take either meaning, and that this somehow rendered it unusable.* You’d still be able to use unbiased, impartial, objective, or unprejudiced for the one meaning, and indifferent, unconcerned, and uninterested for the other. We’re not losing this distinction at all.
Setting aside such misguided passion, let’s look at how disinterested actually is (and has been) used. As we saw in (2a) & (2b), disinterested started out being used for both meanings. This persisted, according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage (MWDEU), through the 19th century without complaint. Noah Webster’s 1828 American Dictionary disinterestedly lists both senses, and it’s not until 1889 that MWDEU finds the first complaint. Opposition to disinterested for “unconcerned” appears to have steadily grown since then, especially in America.
But despite all the grousing, “unbiased” disinterested is hardly in dire straits. MWDEU’s searches found that 70% of all uses of disinterested in their files between 1934 and the 1980s were of this sense, and that this percentage actually increased during the 1980s. Furthermore, the MWDEU notes that the use of disinterested for “unconcerned” usually has a subtle difference from uninterested. Disinterested is often used to indicate that someone has lost interest as opposed to having been uninterested from the start.** This fits with other un-/dis- pairs, such as unarmed/disarmed.
Summary: Far from losing an existing distinction, it seems that we’re witnessing a distinction emerging. Uninterested is now restricted to an “unconcerned” meaning. Disinterested covers impartiality, but it also can take the “uninterested” meaning, often indicating specifically that interest has been lost. Because many people object to this sense of disinterested, you may want to avoid it if you’re uninterested in a fight. Will the distinction ever fully emerge, and the overlap be lost? Would that this desk were a time desk…
—
*: I think it goes without saying that having multiple meanings does not make a word unusable. In case it doesn’t, consider the much more confusing words fly, lead, and read.
**: Compare, for instance, I grew disinterested to I grew uninterested. I definitely prefer the former.
**: MWDEU notes that while the distributions of the two senses overlap, it’s more clear than people let on; “unbiased” disinterested tends to modify an abstract noun like love, whereas “unconcerned” disinterested tends to modify humans, and appear with in in tow.
Motivated Grammar 
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March 21, 2012 at 11:24 am
johnwcowan
While I’m all for reality-based semantics in general, I have to say that disinterested conveys a subtlety that unbiased, impartial, objective, unprejudiced do not capture: the notion that the disinterested person has nothing to gain personally from the point under discussion. We want our judges to be disinterested not only because they can stay awake on the bench, nor merely because they are willing to look at the evidence, but also because they will neither profit nor lose by deciding in our favor.
March 21, 2012 at 11:56 am
Gabe
Thanks for that explanation, John. I should confess that “unbiased” disinterested isn’t really in my lexicon, so I’m not familiar with any subtle usage distinctions for it. But I like that as a distinction akin to the “never had interest” vs. “lost interest” distinction in my own idiolect.
March 22, 2012 at 3:23 am
Eugene
I wonder whether a disinterested judge wouldn’t actually be more likely to fall asleep during the arguments. Whether I want a disinterested judge depends on which side of the issue I’m on. Presumably you don’t want an uninterested judge. In that case you might as well flip a coin.
Nice post. I’m reinterested in the topic.Although people like to get bent out of shape over this issue, MWDEU suggests that it has never been a big problem (if it is a real problem at all). If, in fact, a new distinction is emerging, that would be a nice rebuttal to any argument about language decay.
Perhaps a similar argument could be made about the “distinction” between farther and further (physical and metaphorical, respectively). It’s actually a new distinction being introduced into the language. Historically, they are just two spellings (maybe representing two pronunciations) of the same concept.
So who worries about these things? I have a quick hypothesis. People who teach freshman composition or some such class encounter a lot of writing in which students strive to use fancy terms that they don’t quite control. A student might think that disinterested sounds more sophisticated and would use it to sound smart. The same student might write “between you and I” or infer rather than imply for similar reasons. These are pedagogical issues, not signs that the language is going to the dogs.
The teacher, newly attuned to these issues by the arduous task of editing student papers, starts listening for them, hears quite a few of them, and starts complaining. Even though almost everyone uses imply perfectly and infer rarely, it’s the oddities that stand out.
Anyway, before we spend too much energy debating usage issues (fun though it is), we should probably demand corpus evidence showing that the issue is in fact well attested in usage. I like that you presented that angle in the post.
March 22, 2012 at 1:40 pm
Richard Hershberger
I agree with johnwcowan that “disinterested” means something slightly different from “unbiased”. More to the point, I think, is if there is any genuine ambiguity caused by the dual senses of “disinterested.” I suspect that, as is so often true, the vast majority of potential ambiguities are actually perfectly clear in context.
March 23, 2012 at 12:58 pm
Andrew
I am sometimes amazed at how many words it can take for someone to say “sure, say whatever you’d like.”
March 23, 2012 at 2:31 pm
johnwcowan
Eugene: Yes, I worded that badly: you don’t, indeed, want an uninterested judge. But what is truth compared to the merits of a well-turned periodic sentence? :-)
Eugene, Richard: I agree that there is no real ambiguity between the two senses of disinterested.
March 25, 2012 at 4:05 am
the ridger
Funny, because the ambiguity turns on two meanings of “interest” that no one seems terribly worried about.
March 25, 2012 at 4:06 am
the ridger
ps – why the heck is WordPress demanding I log in every time I want to comment now?
March 26, 2012 at 1:34 am
Eugene
johnwcowan: You didn’t word it badly. You invoked the two senses of the term in one analogy. You presented an opportunity for a bit of word play, and I couldn’t resist. I think the exchange was still on topic.
The ridger has it right about the ambiguity being in the two senses of “interest” rather than in the overlapping functions of un- vs. dis-. And context, as always, helps to disambiuate.
March 26, 2012 at 7:47 pm
Jonathon
Eugene: I think you’re pretty much right about where these rules originate. English teachers and editors see the same errors over and over again, and I think they start to become oversensitive to some of them. Add to that the fact that people seem driven to find distinctions whenever there are two forms that are interchangeable or at least overlapping, and you have a recipe for rule generation.
Good post, Gabe. I wish I’d remembered that Language Log post when I’d written mine; “emergent and incomplete” is a good description of a lot of supposed distinctions.
April 10, 2012 at 10:27 am
Gabe
Eugene: Thanks, that was a really interesting comment. You’re right, I think, that there ought to be more concern for whether a debated point is actually worthy of debate. I always think of the restriction against using since to mean “because”; sure, it sounds like people could get confused, but it’s hard to find a relevantly-ambiguous example in actual usage. And like Jonathon, I agree with your proposed rule source.
Andrew: If that were the default, it would take far fewer.
August 8, 2012 at 7:58 am
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March 7, 2013 at 9:43 pm
David L. Gold
Whether the words “disinterested” and “uninterested” are separating or blurring is a diachronic matter and should therefore be irrelevant to the synchronic question of whether prescriptivists should recommend that the first word not be used to mean ‘indifferent’ (so far as I know, the second word is no longer used in the sense of ‘impartial’). That said, I like to keep them apart, even though it is hard and maybe impossible to find a sentence with the first word that could plausibly be read both ways.
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