Word.ws English Dictionary

unbe

unbe verb: to deprive (someone or something) of being; to make nonexistent.

Verb

unbe (no third-person singular simple present, present participle unbeing, no simple past, past participle unbeen)

  1. (no-past, poetic, rare, transitive) To deprive (someone or something) of being; to make nonexistent.
  2. (intransitive, no-past, poetic, rare) To lack being; to be nonexistent.
    • I cannot bear my fate as writ, / I'd have my life unbe; / Would turn my memory to a blot, / Make every relic of me rot, / My doings be as they were not, / And what they've brought to me!1901, Thomas Hardy, Poems of the Past and the Present, Edinburgh & London: Ballantyne, Hanson & Co., page 234
    • There is a saying that unseen is as good as unbeen; but in this case it was otherwise—unseen, Master Malrubius was more palpably present than ever before.1980, Gene Wolfe, chapter XXXIII, in The Shadow of the Torturer (The Book of the New Sun; 1), New York: Simon & Schuster, →ISBN, page 280

Forms of unbe

present participleunbeing
past participleunbeen

Origin of unbe

From un- + be.

Questions about unbe

What does unbe mean?
Unbe means to deprive (someone or something) of being; to make nonexistent.
What part of speech is unbe?
Unbe is a verb.

Words near unbe in the dictionary

  1. unbattlemented
  2. unbattling
  3. unbaulked
  4. unbayed
  5. unbd.
  6. unbe
  7. unbe-fucking-lievable
  8. unbeach
  9. unbeached
  10. unbeaches
  11. unbeaching

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: unbe (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “unbe.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/unbe. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.