Word.ws English Dictionary

unsay

unsay verb: to withdraw, retract (something said).

Verb

unsay (third-person singular simple present unsays, present participle unsaying, simple past and past participle unsaid)

  1. To withdraw, retract (something said).
    • And in the first place, you will be so good as to unsay that story about selling his head, which if true I take to be good evidence that this harpooneer is stark mad […]1851 November 14, Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers; London: Richard Bentley, →OCLC
    Synonyms:
    retract
  2. To cause something not to have been said; to make it so that one never said something (since this is physically impossible, usually in the subjunctive).
    • I wish I could unsay that.
    • There are some things I'd like to unsay... to my boss... right before he decided to fire me.

unsay meaning in Tamil

unsay in Tamil

சொன்னதைமாற்று, அழித்துச்சொல், மாற்றிச் சொல்

Synonyms of unsay

Forms of unsay

third-person singular presentunsays
present participleunsaying
past participleunsaid
pastunsaid

Past tense of unsay: unsaid

Origin of unsay

From Middle English unseyen, unseien, from Old English onseċġan (“to deny, renounce”), from Proto-West Germanic *andasaggjan (“to unsay, renounce, deny”), equivalent to un- + say. Cognate with Dutch ontzeggen (“to deny”), German entsagen (“to renounce, abjure”).

Phrases with unsay

Questions about unsay

What does unsay mean?
Unsay means to withdraw, retract (something said).
What is unsay in Tamil?
Unsay in Tamil is சொன்னதைமாற்று, அழித்துச்சொல், மாற்றிச் சொல். See Unsay meaning in Tamil.
What part of speech is unsay?
Unsay is a verb.
What is the past tense of unsay?
The past tense of unsay is unsaid.

Words near unsay in the dictionary

  1. unsavvy
  2. unsaw
  3. unsawable
  4. unsawed
  5. unsawn
  6. unsay
  7. unsayability
  8. unsayable
  9. unsayableness
  10. unsayably
  11. unsayed

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: unsay (page history and authors); unsay (Tamil Wiktionary) (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: “unsay.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/unsay. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.