unpack
English
Etymology
From Middle English unpakken, equivalent to un- + pack. Compare Saterland Frisian uutpakje (“to unpack”), West Frisian útpakke (“to unpack”), Dutch uitpakken (“to unpack”), German auspacken (“to unpack”).
Pronunciation
- IPA(key): /ʌnˈpæk/
- Rhymes: -æk
Verb
unpack (third-person singular simple present unpacks, present participle unpacking, simple past and past participle unpacked)
- (transitive) To remove from a package or container, particularly with respect to items that had previously been arranged closely and securely in a pack.
- They didn't have time to unpack their bags before going out to dinner.
- (intransitive) To empty containers that had been packed.
- They didn't have time to unpack before going to dinner.
- (figurative, transitive) To analyze a concept or a text; to explain.
- 2019 October 17, Steven Rattner, “Unpacking the Trade Deficit”, in The New York Times, →ISSN:
- Yet few Americans — including the president — understand how global trade works, both how it can help our economy and how some can be left behind. Let’s try to unpack a few of the complexities.
- (linguistics, intransitive, of a segment such as a vowel) To undergo separation of its features into distinct segments.
- 2000, Language, volume 76, numbers 1-2, page 337:
- The rounded vowels [y] and [œ/ə] in Russian seem to unpack as glide-vowel sequences in words borrowed from French and German, […]
- 2008, Katrin Dohlus, The Role of Phonology and Phonetics in Loanword Adaptation, page 73:
- Whereas the high vowels /ʏ, y/ unpack, the mid vowels /œ, ø/ are adapted as single segments in these languages (see examples in (36) for Vietnamese (Barker 1969) and (37) for Fon (Gbeto 2000)). […]
French /y/ → Vietnamese /wi/
accu [a'ky] → ac-quy [ak kwi]
- 2011, John A. Goldsmith, Jason Riggle, Alan C. L. Yu, editors, The Handbook of Phonological Theory:
- The objective of these corpora was to check whether vowels other than nasal vowels systematically unpack in L1s that do not allow them.
- (computing, transitive) To unzip, decompress.
- 2005, Matthias Kalle Dalheimer, Matt Welsh, Running Linux:
- Packages […] are often archived and compressed using the zip utility; you can unpack these with the unzip command […]
Antonyms
Translations
to remove from a package
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