unwrite

Verb

unwrite (third-person singular simple present unwrites, present participle unwriting, simple past unwrote, past participle unwritten)

1. (transitive) To erase; to revert to a state where (something) was never written.
   • Accordingly, in June, the governor, as if rescinding the resolution could unwrite the letter, demanded its erasure from the records of the house.1847, John Frost, Pictorial Life of George Washington, page 131
   • 'Once you've written something you can't unwrite it,' I answered.2010, Matthew Yorke, Pictures of Lily, →ISBN
2. (transitive) To nullify.
   • And I'm talking about seconds that mean so much! that will let us rewrite our histories—unwrite the letters that Allie wrote near that time; unwrite her time on the beach with Johnny; make us both virgins exactly as I'd seen it then; unwrite my times with Barbara, my phone conversations, letters...1992, Patrick Creevy, Lake Shore Drive, →ISBN
   • What he seeks is nothing less than to unwrite the Fall, to unwrite the theological fiat that made desire (a longing for union) and language (a longing for knowing) the twinned signs of our distance from what was.1993, Elisa New, The Regenerate Lyric, →ISBN
3. (transitive) To deconstruct.
   • In Martha Nussbaum's terms, Luke attempts to “unwrite” the culture-forming stories of paganism by offering a different narrative that construes the entirety of reality in light of the God of Israel's act in Jesus.2008, J. Ross Wagner, Christopher Kavin Rowe, A. Katherine Grieb, The Word Leaps the Gap, →ISBN
   • His texts reveal an effort to unwrite narrative and, in effect, unwrite Beckett.2010, S. E. Gontarski, A Companion to Samuel Beckett, →ISBN, page 303
4. (transitive) To revert to a known state in so that new data can be written.
   • To eliminate this nonadiabatic energy loss, we need to change the cell state into a known state before writing a new data, which is called a^([sic]) unwrite operation.2005, ACM Special Interest Group on Design Automation, IEEE Circuits and Systems Society, IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society, ISLPED'05, →ISBN