MEANING
1. To undo or destroy something that has been created, built up or established.
2. To remove someone from an office, rank or position of power.
3. To change the essential nature, character or central meaning of someone or something.
Use it for
portraying the reversal of creation; showing a reputation or career being destroyed; describing an established order coming apart; giving destruction a sense of undoing earlier constructionExpresses reversal of something created or established, extending to lost authority and altered identity. Writing functions: Destruction and transformation.
Words that belong together
- make and unmake
- unmake a reputation
- unmake a world
On the page
The rumor unmade the reputation he had spent thirty years building.
In the dream, the city unmade itself one doorway at a time.
The council claimed the right to unmake the ruler it had chosen.
His patrons could make and unmake ministers, but they could not silence the streets.
Exile had not destroyed her, but it had unmade the person who once trusted every welcome.
Word forms
- Base
- unmake
- Past tense
- unmade
- Past participle
- unmade
- Present participle
- unmaking
Full tense & aspect guide
- Present
- unmake
- Present continuous
- am/is/are unmaking
- Present perfect
- have/has unmade
- Present perfect continuous
- have/has been unmaking
- Past
- unmade
- Past continuous
- was/were unmaking
- Past perfect
- had unmade
- Past perfect continuous
- had been unmaking
- Future
- will unmake
- Future continuous
- will be unmaking
- Future perfect
- will have unmade
- Future perfect continuous
- will have been unmaking
Choose the auxiliary that agrees with your subject. These are constructions of one word, not separate entries.
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Usage notes
Transitive: unmake, unmakes, unmade, unmade, unmaking; future will unmake. Not every adjective unmade (for example, an unmade bed) denotes an act of unmaking. Register: literary. Commonness: uncommon (qualitative editorial estimate, informed by dictionaries/corpus).
Practice this word in a sentenceYour margin notes
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