ungloss

ungloss verb: to remove the gloss from; to make less glossy.

Verb

ungloss (third-person singular simple present unglosses, present participle unglossing, simple past and past participle unglossed)

To remove the gloss from; to make less glossy.
- 'Twere good sport To prick them forward to the escalade, At stormy midnight from the soaking trench! It would ungloss the butterflies!1838, The Siege of Antwerp. A Historical Play. In Five Acts, page 25
- Already death is busy at your roots, a bug-rite to ungloss you of green glamor1958, Harold Witt, The Death of Venus, page 5
To reverse the process of glossing; to make explicit what has been glossed over.
- Therefore, unless courts can "ungloss" the complete diversity and matter-in-controversy limitations of § 1332, some claims made by intervenors of right — those state-law claims that destroy complete diversity or fail to exceed $75,000 — are structurally incapable of being integrated into the...2002, Jay Tidmarsh, Roger H. Trangsrud, Complex Litigation: Problems in Advanced Civil Procedure, page 84
- I hadn't even realized what I had done in the original poems, but yes, I glossed over, and yes, made pretty. But then to ungloss, sort of like a poetic ungloss, I can think of fictional unglossings like Dorothy Allison's Bastard out of Carolina, but I can't think of a poetic unglossing of that kind...2009, Kate Eichhorn, Heather Milne, Prismatic Publics

ungloss (plural unglosses)

A detail that has been made explicit through unglossing; an unglossing.
- The repetition of line 576-7 'always taken pride of my figure' in line 584 serves to mark the end of this gloss-within-an-ungloss followed by candidate ungloss and decision (lines 574-582) and to make a return to the larger ungloss which began in line 574.1988, 48, Sociolinguistics - Volumes 17-18
- The patient, in saying 'that's the strange thing' is making explicit the fact that, in selecting the possibility of disturbed sleeping habits as a manifestation of anxiety, the counsellor has correctly or legitimately used the documentary method. That is, the patient recognises that given an...2016, Text and talk as social practice, page 67
The act of unglossing.
- I hadn't even realized what I had done in the original poems, but yes, I glossed over, and yes, made pretty. But then to ungloss, sort of like a poetic ungloss, I can think of fictional unglossings like Dorothy Allison's Bastard out of Carolina, but I can't think of a poetic unglossing of that kind...2009, Kate Eichhorn, Heather Milne, Prismatic Publics

Verb
third-person singular present	unglosses
present participle	unglossing
past participle	unglossed
past	unglossed
Noun
plural	unglosses

From un- + gloss.

27 more rhymesFewer rhymes

What does ungloss mean?: Ungloss means to remove the gloss from; to make less glossy.
What part of speech is ungloss?: Ungloss can be a verb or a noun.
What is the past tense of ungloss?: The past tense of ungloss is unglossed.

Adapted from Wiktionary: ungloss (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: 2026-09-02

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