Unstay

verb

verb ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Verb
  1. 1
    To undo the establishment of; disestablish; dissolve; divest. transitive

    "He plays with the late Watts-Dunton and gets good fun out of it; he rips open the sham, unstays the imperfect, sonnet ; he tackles all fretters of the great English instrument and worries them all, yet with a fine sanity."

  2. 2
    To expel; expulse; remove; release; rid. transitive

    "Staying on a mount that is trying to unstay you is a historic procedure of the livestock business."

Synonyms

All synonyms
removeremove

Example

More examples

"He plays with the late Watts-Dunton and gets good fun out of it; he rips open the sham, unstays the imperfect, sonnet ; he tackles all fretters of the great English instrument and worries them all, yet with a fine sanity."

Etymology

From un- + stay.

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