Word.ws English Dictionary

unprovoke

unprovoke verb: to undo or counter a provocation.

Verb

unprovoke (third-person singular simple present unprovokes, present participle unprovoking, simple past and past participle unprovoked)

  1. To undo or counter a provocation.
    • Lechery, sir, it provokes and it unprovokes: it provokes the desire, but it takes away the performance: therefore, much drink may be said to be an equivocator with lechery1606, William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Macbeth
    • Then we'll just have to unprovoke him.1987, William Safire, Freedom, page 758

Examples of unprovoke in a sentence

  • Just as we in the West say that wine provokes the desire and unprovokes the performance, so in Cipangu they say that Oleander-tea unprovokes the desire but provokes the performance.1988, MacDonald Harris, The Cathay Stories and Other Fictions, page 90:
  • Furthermore, I consider political information as catalyst for informatic dialectics; a tranquilizer and of course, an equivocator which can provoke and unprovoke2004, Adele Jinadu, Olatunde Oloko, Crisis of Democratization, Development and Electoral Violence in Nigeria:
  • The equivocating Pandulph provokes and unprovokes, damns and absolves, uncrowns and crowns almost from scene to scene.2005, Joseph Rosenblum, The Greenwood companion to Shakespeare, →ISBN, page 177:

Forms of unprovoke

third-person singular presentunprovokes
present participleunprovoking
past participleunprovoked
pastunprovoked

Origin of unprovoke

From un- + provoke.

Questions about unprovoke

What does unprovoke mean?
Unprovoke means to undo or counter a provocation.
How do you use unprovoke in a sentence?
Just as we in the West say that wine provokes the desire and unprovokes the performance, so in Cipangu they say that Oleander-tea unprovokes the desire but provokes the performance.
What part of speech is unprovoke?
Unprovoke is a verb.
What is the past tense of unprovoke?
The past tense of unprovoke is unprovoked.

Words near unprovoke in the dictionary

  1. unprovisions
  2. unprovocable
  3. unprovocative
  4. unprovocativeness
  5. unprovokable
  6. unprovoke
  7. unprovoked
  8. unprovokedly
  9. unprovokedness
  10. unprovokes
  11. unprovoking

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: unprovoke (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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