disinter

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English

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Etymology

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Borrowed from French désenterrer.

Pronunciation

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Verb

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disinter (third-person singular simple present disinters, present participle disinterring, simple past and past participle disinterred)

  1. (transitive) To take out of the grave or tomb.
    Synonyms: unbury, exhume, dig up
    Antonym: inter
  2. (transitive, figurative) To bring out, as from a grave or hiding place; to bring from obscurity into view.
    • 1870, James Thomson, The City of Dreadful Night:
      Why disinter dead faith from mouldering hidden?
    • 1886 January 5, Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, London: Longmans, Green, and Co., →OCLC:
      At this moment, however, the rooms bore every mark of having been recently and hurriedly ransacked; clothes lay about the floor, with their pockets inside out; lock-fast drawers stood open; and on the hearth there lay a pile of grey ashes, as though many papers had been burned. From these embers the inspector disinterred the butt end of a green cheque book, which had resisted the action of the fire.
    • 2001 May 12, Robert Potts, “The poet at play”, in The Guardian[1], →ISSN:
      In his lectures he is equally wide-ranging and allusive, making strange links and analogies between apparently unrelated texts and ideas, and disinterring etymologies which writers cannot have been aware of.

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