Word.ws English Dictionary

unstay

unstay verb: to undo the establishment of; disestablish; dissolve; divest.

Verb

unstay (third-person singular simple present unstays, present participle unstaying, simple past and past participle unstayed)

  1. (transitive) To undo the establishment of; disestablish; dissolve; divest.
    • He plays with the late Watts-Dunton and gets good fun out of it; he rips open the sham, unstays the imperfect, sonnet ; he tackles all fretters of the great English instrument and worries them all, yet with a fine sanity.1918, Ford Madox Ford, The English review
    • "[...] And true it is that the life of man is in the hands of God; and the state of kingdoms doth also belong to Him, to stay or to unstay them." All men had clearly foreseen that Edward's death would beget the evils of a disputed succession.1967, John Nichols, The Gentleman's magazine
  2. (transitive) To expel; expulse; remove; release; rid.
    • Staying on a mount that is trying to unstay you is a historic procedure of the livestock business.2005, Ivan Doig, English Creek

Forms of unstay

third-person singular presentunstays
present participleunstaying
past participleunstayed
pastunstayed

Origin of unstay

From un- + stay.

Questions about unstay

What does unstay mean?
Unstay means to undo the establishment of; disestablish; dissolve; divest.
What part of speech is unstay?
Unstay is a verb.
What is the past tense of unstay?
The past tense of unstay is unstayed.

Words near unstay in the dictionary

  1. unstatutable
  2. unstatutably
  3. unstaunchable
  4. unstaunched
  5. unstaved
  6. unstay
  7. unstayable
  8. unstayed
  9. unstayedness
  10. unstaying
  11. unstays

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: unstay (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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