unwill
unwill noun: lack or absence of will; willlessness; undesire.
Noun
unwill (plural unwills)
- Lack or absence of will; willlessness; undesire.
- Woe to him that shall be under His unwill!1895, Kuno Meyer, The Voyage of Bran, Son of Febal, to the Land of the Living
- They are major poets out of whak, twisted and balked by unwill.1988, Daniel G. Marowski, Contemporary Literary Criticism, page 5
Verb
unwill (third-person singular simple present unwills, present participle unwilling, simple past and past participle unwilled)
- To annul or reverse by an act of the will.
- And as he is, who unwills what he willed, / And by new thoughts doth his intention change, / So that from his design he quite withdraws, / Such I became, upon that dark hillside, / Because, in thinking, I consumed the emprise, / Which was so very prompt in the beginning.1867, Dante Alighieri, “Canto II”, in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, transl., The Divine Comedy, volume I (Inferno), Boston, Mass.: Ticknor and Fields, →OCLC, page 8, lines 37–42
- But if it can will and unwill, it can also love and hate, and if it can love and hate, it can also in some small degree do the works of the law and believe the gospel.1969, Ernest Gordon Rupp, Philip Saville Watson, Luther and Erasmus: Free Will and Salvation
Examples of unwill in a sentence
- The first challenge to shaping and taming this emerging world is the will itself and the human problem of unwill, especially in relation to femininity.2005, Melodie Calvert, Jennifer Terry, Processed Lives:
- If women are showing "technological ineptitude" and are "disinclined towards technology" by showing an "unwill" to co-operate technologically, does this merely indicate stupidity?2009, Amanda du Preez, Gendered Bodies and New Technologies:
- You can't back up like a dumptruck and unwill the actions of the past, much as we may long to.2007, Joan Frank, The Great Far Away, page 167:
Forms of unwill
| Noun | |
|---|---|
| plural | unwills |
| Verb | |
| third-person singular present | unwills |
| present participle | unwilling |
| past participle | unwilled |
| past | unwilled |
Origin of unwill
From un- (“lack or absence of”) + will (noun). Compare Dutch onwil.
From un- (reverse action prefix) + will (verb).
Questions about unwill
- What does unwill mean?
- Unwill means lack or absence of will; willlessness; undesire.
- How do you use unwill in a sentence?
- The first challenge to shaping and taming this emerging world is the will itself and the human problem of unwill, especially in relation to femininity.
- What part of speech is unwill?
- Unwill can be a noun or a verb.
- What is the plural of unwill?
- The plural of unwill is unwills.
Words near unwill in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: unwill (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: “unwill.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/unwill. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.