Untie

//ʌnˈtaɪ// verb

verb ·Moderate ·College level

Definitions

Verb
  1. 1
    To loosen, as something interlaced or knotted; to disengage the parts of. transitive

    "to untie a knot"

  2. 2
    undo the ties of wordnet
  3. 3
    To free from fastening or from restraint; to let loose; to unbind. transitive

    "Though you untie the winds, and let them fight / Against the churches."

  4. 4
    cause to become loose wordnet
  5. 5
    To resolve; to unfold; to clear.

    "They quicken sloth, perplexities untie."

Show 2 more definitions
  1. 6
    To become untied or loosed. intransitive
  2. 7
    In the Perl programming language, to undo the process of tying, so that a variable uses default instead of custom functionality. transitive

    "After you finish with the INI file, all you need to do is untie the hash. Then you really are finished!"

Synonyms

All synonyms
cast offcleardetachdisembarrassdisembroildisencumber

Example

More examples

"The first thing he did was to untie his shoelaces and take his shoes off."

Etymology

From Middle English untien, unteyen, untyȝen, untiȝen, from Old English untīġan (“to untie”), equivalent to un- + tie.

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