Ungloss
noun, verb ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 A detail that has been made explicit through unglossing; an unglossing.
"The repetition of line 576-7 'always taken pride of my figure' in line 584 serves to mark the end of this gloss-within-an-ungloss followed by candidate ungloss and decision (lines 574-582) and to make a return to the larger ungloss which began in line 574."
- 2 The act of unglossing.
"I hadn't even realized what I had done in the original poems, but yes, I glossed over, and yes, made pretty. But then to ungloss, sort of like a poetic ungloss, I can think of fictional unglossings like Dorothy Allison's Bastard out of Carolina, but I can't think of a poetic unglossing of that kind of childhood narrative."
- 1 To remove the gloss from; to make less glossy.
"'Twere good sport To prick them forward to the escalade, At stormy midnight from the soaking trench! It would ungloss the butterflies!"
- 2 To reverse the process of glossing; to make explicit what has been glossed over.
"Therefore, unless courts can "ungloss" the complete diversity and matter-in-controversy limitations of § 1332, some claims made by intervenors of right — those state-law claims that destroy complete diversity or fail to exceed $75,000 — are structurally incapable of being integrated into the federal case."
Example
More examples"'Twere good sport To prick them forward to the escalade, At stormy midnight from the soaking trench! It would ungloss the butterflies!"
Etymology
From un- + gloss.
More for "ungloss"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.