Word.ws English Dictionary

unlove

unlove noun: the lack, absence, or omission of love; lovelessness; enmity; neglect; hate.

Noun

unlove (uncountable)

  1. The lack, absence, or omission of love; lovelessness; enmity; neglect; hate.
    • Disgust, nausea, loathing—some aspects of yourself and others surely deserve such abhorrent gut responses. But disgust doesn't create suffering— recoil does. Separation is the act of unlove.2005, David Deida, Blue Truth
    • How do you experience this sense of unlove in your body? Notice the specific quality of the bodily […] Then see if you can let the feeling of unlove be there just as it is, without trying to fix it, change it, or judge it.2007, John Welwood, Perfect Love, Imperfect Relationships

Verb

unlove (third-person singular simple present unloves, present participle unloving, simple past and past participle unloved)

  1. (transitive) To lose one's love (for someone or something).
    • I have told you, reader, that I had learnt to love Mr. Rochester: I could not unlove him now, merely because I found that he had ceased to notice me--because I might pass hours in his presence, and he would never once turn his eyes in my direction--because I saw all his attentions appropriated by a...1847, Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre
    • And now, having once loved, she will be slow to unlove again.1874, Rhoda Broughton, Nancy

Forms of unlove

third-person singular presentunloves
present participleunloving
past participleunloved
pastunloved

Origin of unlove

From un- (“not; lack of”) + love (noun).

From Middle English unloven, equivalent to un- (reversal prefix) + love (verb).

Questions about unlove

What does unlove mean?
Unlove means the lack, absence, or omission of love; lovelessness; enmity; neglect; hate.
What part of speech is unlove?
Unlove can be a noun or a verb.

Words near unlove in the dictionary

  1. unlouvred
  2. unlovability
  3. unlovable
  4. unlovableness
  5. unlovably
  6. unlove
  7. unloveability
  8. unloveable
  9. unloveableness
  10. unloveably
  11. unloved

Source and license

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