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Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
unstable
adjective
COLLOCATIONS FROM CORPUS
■ ADVERB
highly
▪ So you see, beneath that calm exterior lies a highly unstable child.
▪ Because of its highly unstable nature, various thromboxane A 2 -generating systems have to be used in order to study its vasoactive properties.
mentally
▪ But Gore was a sick man. Mentally unstable, he would kill his parents in an explosive night of violence.
▪ They may be able to help the unbalanced and mentally unstable to become somewhat more balanced and stable, we admit.
▪ The conventional accounts of violence against women suggest that most men who are violent to women are mentally unstable in some way.
▪ The woman, who was described as mentally unstable, refused to talk about her reasons for the shooting.
▪ She hadn't known, until after she was married to Paul, that he had a brother who was mentally unstable.
▪ Simpson said the lawyers accused her of being mentally unstable.
▪ The resulting uncertainty as to whether she was coming or going had made her, to some extent, mentally unstable.
too
▪ Reactions have varied, but it's universally agreed that the preview is way too unstable and slow for everyday use.
▪ He was not yet five, and her life seemed too unstable there.
▪ Fears remain, however, that the area is too unstable for any such measures to be effective.
▪ They were too unstable to be transported.
very
▪ The situation there remains very unstable.
▪ These resonant orbits are very unstable.
▪ It was potentially extremely dangerous and although it had survived since the war it may have been very unstable.
▪ Handy rejects a full-blown version of this vision on the grounds that such a divergent society would be very unstable.
▪ For the moment everything seemed calm, but under the surface the whole situation was very unstable.
▪ Other places, particularly the tropical Far East have been very unstable over the last 15 million years.
■ NOUN
angina
▪ Contraindications to exercise training include unstable angina pectoris, ventricular arrhythmias, and severe aortic stenosis.
▪ Sophia has unstable angina and is refusing surgery from which she might benefit.
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ an unstable economy
▪ He is emotionally unstable, and his aggressive attitude often culminates in violence.
▪ Regimes governed by violence are always unstable.
▪ That scaffolding looks unstable - get all the building workers off the site immediately.
▪ Was it safe to trust someone who was so emotionally unstable?
▪ Working with Clare every day, I began to realize how unstable she was.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ Handy rejects a full-blown version of this vision on the grounds that such a divergent society would be very unstable.
▪ It was potentially extremely dangerous and although it had survived since the war it may have been very unstable.
▪ Mentally unstable, he would kill his parents in an explosive night of violence.
▪ The isotope U-235 is unstable, decaying by a process called spontaneous fission.
▪ The situation here is precarious, quite unstable.
▪ The situation there remains very unstable.
▪ The woman, who was described as mentally unstable, refused to talk about her reasons for the shooting.
▪ This moves their orbital electrons from the ground state to a higher energy level that is unstable.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Unstable

Unstable \Un*sta"ble\, a. [Cf. Instable.] Not stable; not firm, fixed, or constant; subject to change or overthrow. -- Un*sta"ble*ness, n.
--Chaucer.

Unstable equilibrium. See Stable equilibrium, under Stable.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
unstable

early 13c., "apt to move," from un- (1) "not" + stable (adj.). Similar formation in Middle High German unstabel. Meaning "liable to fall" is recorded from c.1300; sense of "fickle" is attested from late 13c. An Old English word for this was feallendlic, which might have become *fally.

Wiktionary
unstable

a. Having a strong tendency to change.

WordNet
unstable
  1. adj. lacking stability or fixity or firmness; "unstable political conditions"; "the tower proved to be unstable in the high wind"; "an unstable world economy" [ant: stable]

  2. highly or violently reactive; "sensitive and highly unstable compounds"

  3. affording no ease or reassurance; "a precarious truce" [syn: precarious]

  4. suffering from severe mental illness; "of unsound mind" [syn: mentally ill, unsound]

  5. disposed to psychological variability; "his rather unstable religious convictions"

  6. subject to change; variable; "a fluid situation fraught with uncertainty"; "everything was unstable following the coup" [syn: fluid]

Wikipedia
Unstable (song)

"Unstable" is the first single released from the Adema album, Unstable. It is featured in Madden NFL 2004

Unstable (album)

Unstable is Adema's second and also final album to feature its original lineup with vocalist Mark Chavez departing from the band after its release and then again after their reunion. It was released on August 12, 2003. It has sold about 400,000 copies worldwide. Its radio single was the self-titled song "Unstable", which also had a music video, but it didn't get very much radio play. Many songs relied more on instrumentation and harmony instead of distortion in comparison to their previous album, but the album also has some of the band's most aggressive work. It was less successful than their first album, debuting at number 43 on the Billboard 200 before quickly falling off the chart.

Unstable (Debian)

In the Debian jargon, unstable is the development distribution of Debian. It is codenamed sid (after the boy next door who broke toys in Toy Story). As unstable never becomes testing, this codename is permanent, contrary to the codenames of stable and testing, which have volatile codenames.

unstable has some newer packages, but suffers from an unusually high number of serious bugs, as many packages are new. In development periods, the number of bugs considered "Release-Critical" by the Debian project in unstable is typically between 2 and 3 times as many as the number in testing.

unstable is targeted at Debian developers for building packages to be uploaded to unstable, and other Debian users that know Debian well in general, master Debian package management, are good for reporting bugs, want to help the Debian project, and have some machines on which they don't depend.

Usage examples of "unstable".

Khasr ship revealed that its whole substance was a highly unstable allotrope, which, however, was not radioactive.

That new continuity is always too tenuous, too unstable, and does not offer sorcerers the assuredness they need to function as if they were in the world of everyday life.

Anyway, it was no wonder Bilong seemed immature and unstable, and threw herself at Vasil while flirting over her shoulder with Ori.

Big Screen was like an electroshock cattle prod hammered down the earthquake faults of human identity which ripple and shudder at magnitude ten and slip and slide and pulverize and resettle into new and rarely improved and NEVER stable identities and wait for the next inevitable twitch and shudder that will send reality sprawling once again like pieces of ice flying around a high-speed blender and create a new and even more unstable formation and reinforce the creeping paranoia that has flooded the dazed soul that WAS you but has become something else, something different THAT was what FILM could do.

I had been carrying the bag longways on, which made it more unstable but meant that its weight was distributed directly down the line of my body.

Our economy is unstable, our culture is stagnating, our ambition has been misdirected and stifled.

The congressional and state elections of 1894 revealed the unstable equilibrium of parties, and at the same time the total Populist vote of nearly a million and a half reflected the increasing popular unrest.

The quirky, unstable, bad driver with the nutty family and eyes that seemed to look all the way into her soul.

The discourse and the conversation that followed again melted the Sachem, and he repented and retracted, although he continued an unsafe and unstable man.

It needed only unstable personalities, capable of self-induced trance states, so to widen all this as to supply the bases of spiritistic faith and the material for the immensely laborious investigation of the Society for Psychical Research.

He heaved the stang to him, hearing the creak of unstable timber as half a ton of wood moved like an oiled crankshaft in his hands.

But right now, sitting across a table from an obviously unstable Dudley Bose, Stig felt as if he was being manipulated into that very position.

Perhaps the wreck contained a generator of unstable superheavy nuclei.

Comp troller of the Wool Customs for the port of London, Chaucer was a successful civil servant whose other life as a poet had bloomed in an astonishing break with precedent: in 1369 he had written a long poem of courtly love, The Book of the Duchess, not in French appropriate to its subject and audience, but in unliterary and still unstable English.

The tribal mode probably originated in the unstable social conditions that resulted from the protracted decline of the Abbasid Caliphate and the subsequent cycles of invasion and devastation.