Unmother
noun, verb ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 A woman who is not a mother.
"How we lace away The hours interminable, Intricate and Pale, we nuns And all such unmothers of men;"
- 1 To cause to cease being a mother; to kill or otherwise remove (a mother's) children.
"One day modi mother and unmothered. True twinnes in birth and death ; together drown in this sad stream."
- 2 To cause to cease having a mother or to fail to mother properly.
"Whatever keeps me from my beginnings, whatever chops me off and isolates me from my whole life is to the harm of my spirit; it unmothers me; it dispossesses me of my heritage and of my truth, and how can I pass on what is mine if I have not received what was others' and passed on to me? he thought."
Example
More examples"How we lace away The hours interminable, Intricate and Pale, we nuns And all such unmothers of men;"
Etymology
From un- + mother.
More for "unmother"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.