Word.ws English Dictionary

unlink

unlink verb: to decouple; to remove a link from, or separate the links of.

Verb

unlink (third-person singular simple present unlinks, present participle unlinking, simple past and past participle unlinked)

  1. (transitive) To decouple; to remove a link from, or separate the links of.
  2. (Unix, transitive) To delete (a file).
    • That's because the permission to unlink a file doesn't depend upon the permission bits on the file itself; it's the permission bits on the directory that contains the file that matter.2001, Tom Phoenix, Randal L. Schwartz, Learning Perl, "O'Reilly Media, Inc.", →ISBN, page 175

Noun

unlink (plural unlinks)

  1. (knot theory) A link that is equivalent (under ambient isotopy) to finitely many disjoint circles in the plane.

Forms of unlink

Verb
third-person singular presentunlinks
present participleunlinking
past participleunlinked
pastunlinked
Noun
pluralunlinks

Origin of unlink

From un- + link.

Words formed from unlink

Questions about unlink

What does unlink mean?
Unlink means to decouple; to remove a link from, or separate the links of.
What part of speech is unlink?
Unlink can be a verb or a noun.
What is the past tense of unlink?
The past tense of unlink is unlinked.

Words near unlink in the dictionary

  1. unlinered
  2. unlines
  3. unlingering
  4. unlinguistic
  5. unlining
  6. unlink
  7. unlinkability
  8. unlinkable
  9. unlinked
  10. unlinker
  11. unlinkers

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: unlink (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: “unlink.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/unlink. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.