Unarrest

noun, verb

noun, verb ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    The act of cancelling an arrest.

    "However, it has been suggested to the Committee that police will not utilise this power because there will be a fear of the "unarrest" being used as evidence of a wrongful arrest."

Verb
  1. 1
    To release (an arrested person) from custody. transitive

    "She was swearing at the police who were trying to deal with a domestic incident. I had to break up the situation, the harassment was interfering with them dealing with the original fight. It was decided to unarrest her when we realised her age."

Example

More examples

"She was swearing at the police who were trying to deal with a domestic incident. I had to break up the situation, the harassment was interfering with them dealing with the original fight. It was decided to unarrest her when we realised her age."

Etymology

From un- + arrest.

Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.