Unsay
verb ·Uncommon ·Advanced level
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 take back what one has said wordnet
- 3 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."
Example
More examples"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 […]"
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”).
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.