What does "unwrite" mean?

To erase; to revert to a state where (something) was never written.

Unwrite

verb

verb ·Rare ·Advanced level

Verb

1
To erase; to revert to a state where (something) was never written. transitive
"Accordingly, in June, the governor, as if rescinding the resolution could unwrite the letter, demanded its erasure from the records of the house."
2
To nullify. transitive
"And I'm talking about seconds that mean so much! that will let us rewrite our histories—unwrite the letters that Allie wrote near that time; unwrite her time on the beach with Johnny; make us both virgins exactly as I'd seen it then; unwrite my times with Barbara, my phone conversations, letters, years of druggy dreams of her, and my revenge story and all of Allie's times with Lemaster."
3
To deconstruct. transitive
"In Martha Nussbaum's terms, Luke attempts to “unwrite” the culture-forming stories of paganism by offering a different narrative that construes the entirety of reality in light of the God of Israel's act in Jesus."
4
To revert to a known state in so that new data can be written. transitive
"To eliminate this nonadiabatic energy loss, we need to change the cell state into a known state before writing a new data, which is called a^([sic]) unwrite operation."

"Accordingly, in June, the governor, as if rescinding the resolution could unwrite the letter, demanded its erasure from the records of the house."

From un- + write.

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