Word.ws English Dictionary

unpacked

unpacked is the past participle of unpack.

Adjective

unpacked (not comparable)

  1. Having had its packing removed.
    • I worked all day and managed to get all the boxes unpacked.
  2. Not yet packed.
    • The unpacked gifts are on the table.
  3. (proscribed, sometimes) Not yet having had its packing removed. (Especially after still. For more on this use, see http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002171.html)
    • I left the box, still unpacked, at our old house.

Meaning of 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
  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
  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

Origin of unpacked

From un- + packed and unpack + -ed.

Questions about unpacked

What does unpacked mean?
Unpacked means having had its packing removed.
What is unpacked the past participle of?
Unpacked is the past participle of unpack.
What part of speech is unpacked?
Unpacked is an adjective.

Words near unpacked in the dictionary

  1. unpackaged
  2. unpackager
  3. unpackagers
  4. unpackages
  5. unpackaging
  6. unpacked
  7. unpacker
  8. unpackers
  9. unpacking
  10. unpackings
  11. unpacks

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: unpacked (page history and authors); unpack (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.

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