Word.ws English Dictionary

undumb

undumb adjective: not dumb (in various senses).

Adjective

undumb (not comparable)

  1. Not dumb (in various senses).
    • Then I did a miracle on myself and came undumb.1926, P. C. Wren, Beau Sabreur: By Percival Christopher Wren, page 298
    • This is a perfect phrase, a phrase that unveils the irony of Cézanne's unlong and undumb paintings — each, we might assume, with its own unfixed idea of velocity.1995, Joseph Grigely, Textualterity: Art, Theory, and Textual Criticism, University of Michigan Press, →ISBN, page 126

Verb

undumb (third-person singular simple present undumbs, present participle undumbing, simple past and past participle undumbed)

  1. to make no longer dumb.
    • One of her earlier bosses said of her: “She gives people a chance to undumb themselves—she asks lots of questions, gives careful feedback, delegates complete tasks with careful instructions.1989 January 1, Michael Lombardo, Robert Eichinger, Preventing Derailment: What To Do Before It's Too Late, Center for Creative Leadership, →ISBN, page 12
    • Almost everyone knows we have dumbed down our schools and have to undumb them.2010 May 11, Ben Wattenberg, Values Matter Most: How Republicans, or Democrats, or a Third Party Can Win and Renew the American Way of Life, Simon and Schuster, →ISBN, page 93

Examples of undumb in a sentence

  • You, with all your undumb letters, would never write so elementary a phrase; perhaps you wouldn't even feel it.1996, Vita Sackville-West, edited by Peter Washington, Love Letters, Everyman's Library, →ISBN, page 66:
  • “If there are no undumb questions, meeting adjourned.”2014 October 7, Faith Hunter, Broken Soul, Penguin, →ISBN:
  • The wave is quantum entanglement, Multipersonhood, over determination, and even that doesn't begin to undumb what's going on.2020 April 7, Richard Grossinger, Bottoming Out the Universe: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing, Simon and Schuster, →ISBN:

Forms of undumb

Adjective
superlative (rare)undumbest
Verb
third-person singular presentundumbs
present participleundumbing
past participleundumbed
pastundumbed

Origin of undumb

From un- + dumb.

Questions about undumb

What does undumb mean?
Undumb means not dumb (in various senses).
How do you use undumb in a sentence?
You, with all your undumb letters, would never write so elementary a phrase; perhaps you wouldn't even feel it.
What part of speech is undumb?
Undumb can be an adjective or a verb.

Words near undumb in the dictionary

  1. unduloid
  2. unduloids
  3. undulose
  4. undulous
  5. unduly
  6. undumb
  7. undumbed
  8. undumber
  9. undumbest
  10. undumbing
  11. undumbs

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: undumb (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.

Last updated:

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