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unsay

verb

Etymology

From Middle English unseyen, unseien, from Old English onseċġan (“to deny, renounce”), from Proto-West Germanic *andasaggjan (“to unsay, renounce, deny”), equivalent to un- + say. Cognate with Dutch ontzeggen (“to deny”), German entsagen (“to renounce, abjure”).

  1. inherited from *andasaggjan✻ — “to unsay, renounce, deny”
  2. inherited from onseċġan — “to deny, renounce”
  3. inherited from unseyen

Definitions

  1. To withdraw, retract (something said).

    • And in the first place, you will be so good as to unsay that story about selling his head, which if true I take to be good evidence that this harpooneer is stark mad […]

  2. To cause something not to have been said

    To cause something not to have been said; to make it so that one never said something (since this is physically impossible, usually in the subjunctive).

    • I wish I could unsay that.
    • There are some things I'd like to unsay... to my boss... right before he decided to fire me.

The neighborhood

Vish — recursive loop

No curated loop yet for unsay. 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