unpack

Verb

unpack (third-person singular simple present unpacks, present participle unpacking, simple past and past participle unpacked)

1. (transitive) To remove from a package or container, particularly with respect to items that had previously been arranged closely and securely in a pack.
   • They didn't have time to unpack their bags before going out to dinner.
2. (intransitive) To empty containers that had been packed.
   • They didn't have time to unpack before going to dinner.
3. (figuratively, transitive) To analyze a concept or a text; to explain.
   • There may be another argument here, if we had time to unpack it, about modernism and the rise of the middle classes.2013 September 20, Anne Enright, “A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride – review”, in The Guardian
   • Yet few Americans — including the president — understand how global trade works, both how it can help our economy and how some can be left behind. Let’s try to unpack a few of the complexities.2019 October 17, Steven Rattner, “Unpacking the Trade Deficit”, in The New York Times, →ISSN
4. (intransitive) To undergo separation of its features into distinct segments.
   • The rounded vowels [y] and [œ/ə] in Russian seem to unpack as glide-vowel sequences in words borrowed from French and German, […]2000, Language, volume 76, numbers 1-2, page 337
   • Whereas the high vowels /ʏ, y/ unpack, the mid vowels /œ, ø/ are adapted as single segments in these languages (see examples in (36) for Vietnamese (Barker 1969) and (37) for Fon (Gbeto 2000)). […]
     French /y/ → Vietnamese /wi/
     accu [a'ky] → ac-quy [ak kwi]2008, Katrin Dohlus, The Role of Phonology and Phonetics in Loanword Adaptation, page 73
5. (transitive) To decompress (data).
   • Packages […] are often archived and compressed using the zip utility; you can unpack these with the unzip command[…]2005, Matthias Kalle Dalheimer, Matt Welsh, Running Linux