Word.ws English Dictionary

unsaying

unsaying is the present participle and gerund of unsay.

Meaning of unsay

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.

Questions about unsaying

What is unsaying the present participle and gerund of?
Unsaying is the present participle and gerund of unsay.

Words near unsaying in the dictionary

  1. unsayability
  2. unsayable
  3. unsayableness
  4. unsayably
  5. unsayed
  6. unsaying
  7. unsays
  8. UNSC
  9. unscabbard
  10. unscabbarded
  11. unscabbarding

Source and license

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