Word.ws English Dictionary

unself

unself noun: that which is not the self.

Noun

unself (countable and uncountable, plural unselves)

  1. That which is not the self.
    • Beckett's text for Neither is a fantasia on limbo, on the no-man's-land between self and unself, subject and object, where we are all forced to dwell: […]2003, Daniel Albright, Beckett and Aesthetics, page 149
    Synonyms:
    nonself

Verb

unself (third-person singular simple present unselfs, present participle unselfing, simple past and past participle unselfed)

  1. (transitive) To deprive of, or detach from, the self.
    • The goal, said [Simone] Weil, — and the British writer Iris Murdoch after her — was to unself. The whole point, in their supposition, was to turn one’s attention toward the bigger questions.2026 February 15, Lauren Jackson, “How to Pay Attention”, in The New York Times, →ISSN

Synonyms of unself

Forms of unself

Noun
pluralunselves
Verb
third-person singular presentunselfs
present participleunselfing
past participleunselfed
pastunselfed

Origin of unself

From un- + self.

Questions about unself

What does unself mean?
Unself means that which is not the self.
What part of speech is unself?
Unself can be a noun or a verb.
What is the plural of unself?
The plural of unself is unselves.

Words near unself in the dictionary

  1. unselective
  2. unselectively
  3. unselectiveness
  4. unselectivity
  5. unselects
  6. unself
  7. unself-conscious
  8. unself-consciously
  9. unself-consciousness
  10. unselfaware
  11. unselfconscious

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: unself (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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