UNFRIENDLYÜ

adjective (Environment) (Science and Technology) Unhelpful or harmful; used especially as a combining form in compound adjectives in which the preceding noun names the person or thing hindered or harmed, including: environment-unfriendly, harmful to the environment (see environment°); not ecological; ozone-unfriendly, contributing to ozone depletion; not ozone-friendly (see ozone); user-unfriendly, unhelpful to the user; not user-friendly; also as a noun user-unfriendliness. Etymology: Formed by adding the prefix un- to friendly: see -friendly. History and Usage: The idea of this kind of unfriendliness arose from the success of the term user-friendly in the world of computing: see the history given under that heading and at -friendly. Searching for a word to serve as the opposite of friendly in this sense, some people chose hostile (see under user-friendly) and others preferred unfriendly. In general, unfriendly was the more successful and productive choice (especially as a combining form) in writing on environmental issues since about the middle of the eighties, while -hostile enjoyed almost equal success in computing. Unfriendly presented some of the same grammatical problems as -friendly, especially when printed without a preceding hyphen: as a free-standing adjective it could not be combined with another adjective to form a compound, so the parallel form environmentally unfriendly developed alongside environment-unfriendly. One of the most popular general-purpose benchmarks is the Sieve of Eratosthenes, probably the most user-unfriendly title in the business. Byte Feb. 1984, p. 160 A useful document for anyone campaigning on the ozone issue or wishing to avoid ozone-unfriendly packaging. Green Line Oct. 1988, p. 5 Chemical reactions take place...transforming...'friendly' non-destructive chlorine and bromine into an 'unfriendly' radical form that destroys ozone. Boston Globe 23 Jan. 1989, p. 30 Denmark, which also has strict environmental regulations, heavily taxes environment-unfriendly products. Chemical Week 6 Sept. 1989, p. 30