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The word "Unneeded" is a lot rarer than "Unnecessary", according to Google ngrams. The word "Unneeded" has also been used less in older times than current times, which would be consistent with it being a non-standard word.

oxforddictionaries.com and Wiktionary have definitions for "Unneeded", and don't describe it as non-standard. But I'm not certain that it is standard English.

Are people likely to regard "Unneeded" as non-standard, or as a newspeak style neologism based on combining "un" with "needed" by someone who doesn't know how to spell "Unnecessary"?

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  • It is unnecessary to wonder if every word you use is "non-standard", since there is no "standard". And, no, it is not true that "unneeded" is unneeded.
    – Hot Licks
    Commented Sep 22, 2015 at 1:39

1 Answer 1

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You're right that "unnecessary" is used more than "unneeded": the google reports a 20:1 advantage for the former. But that's still over 5M hits for the latter, hardly a usage that most people would regard as "non-standard." (By which I term I take it you mean a word so close to obsolescence that native speakers would almost never use it and find it distractingly quaint when they heard others do so.)

I think most readers fluent in English would understand that the phrase "unneeded organs" in a news article would refer to transplant doctors' fervent hope that one day enough people would volunteer to be organ donors after their deaths that there would be a surplus of such organs available for transplant. So many that sometimes the docs couldn't use them all.

On the other hand, those same readers would understand that the phrase "unnecessary organs" would refer to useless bodily structures that evolution has bequeathed us. You know, like the epoophoron.

The two words are not quite interchangeable.

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