Contextualizebeta

unpack

verb
/ʌnˈpæk/

Etymology

From Middle English unpakken, equivalent to un- + pack. Compare Saterland Frisian uutpakje (“to unpack”), West Frisian útpakke (“to unpack”), Dutch uitpakken (“to unpack”), German auspacken (“to unpack”).

  1. inherited from unpakken

Definitions

  1. To remove from a package or container, particularly with respect to items that had…

    To remove from a package or container, particularly with respect to items that had previously been arranged closely and securely in a pack.

    • They didn't have time to unpack their bags before going out to dinner.

  2. To empty containers that had been packed.

    • They didn't have time to unpack before going to dinner.

  3. To analyze a concept or a text

    To analyze a concept or a text; to explain.

    • There may be another argument here, if we had time to unpack it, about modernism and the rise of the middle classes.
    • Yet few Americans — including the president — understand how global trade works, both how it can help our economy and how some can be left behind. Let’s try to unpack a few of the complexities.
    • From a gender reveal to a secret ceremony and rifts with other royal family members, there was a lot to unpack from the interview
  4. ›+ 2 more definitions

    1. To undergo separation of its features into distinct segments.

      • The rounded vowels [y] and [œ/ə] in Russian seem to unpack as glide-vowel sequences in words borrowed from French and German, […]
      • The objective of these corpora was to check whether vowels other than nasal vowels systematically unpack in L1s that do not allow them.

    2. To decompress (data).

      • Packages […] are often archived and compressed using the zip utility; you can unpack these with the unzip command[…]

The neighborhood

Vish — recursive loop

No curated loop yet for unpack. Loops are being traced one word at a time while the ingestion pipeline matures.

sense glosses and etymology drawn from English Wiktionary · source · CC-BY-SA