ungloss

English

Etymology

un- +‎ gloss

Verb

ungloss (third-person singular simple present unglosses, present participle unglossing, simple past and past participle unglossed)

1. To remove the gloss from; to make less glossy.
   • 1838, The Siege of Antwerp. A Historical Play. In Five Acts, page 25:

     'Twere good sport To prick them forward to the escalade, At stormy midnight from the soaking trench! It would ungloss the butterflies!

   • 1958, Harold Witt, The Death of Venus, page 5:

     Already death is busy at your roots, a bug-rite to ungloss you of green glamor

   • 1977, Nancy Dean, Myra Stark, In the looking glass: twenty-one modern short stories by women, page 11:

     Rousseau's trees and leaves and branches are shiny-green enamel. Ungloss them. Smudge them black, the lion has finished eating the leopard, the stillness is eternal . . . that is my head.

2. To reverse the process of glossing; to make explicit what has been glossed over.
   • 2002, Jay Tidmarsh, Roger H. Trangsrud, Complex Litigation: Problems in Advanced Civil Procedure, page 84:

     Therefore, unless courts can "ungloss" the complete diversity and matter-in-controversy limitations of § 1332, some claims made by intervenors of right — those state-law claims that destroy complete diversity or fail to exceed $75,000 — are structurally incapable of being integrated into the federal case.

   • 2009, Kate Eichhorn, Heather Milne, Prismatic Publics:

     I hadn't even realized what I had done in the original poems, but yes, I glossed over, and yes, made pretty. But then to ungloss, sort of like a poetic ungloss, I can think of fictional unglossings like Dorothy Allison's Bastard out of Carolina, but I can't think of a poetic unglossing of that kind of childhood narrative.

   • 2016, Text and talk as social practice, page 67:

     The patient, in saying 'that's the strange thing' is making explicit the fact that, in selecting the possibility of disturbed sleeping habits as a manifestation of anxiety, the counsellor has correctly or legitimately used the documentary method. That is, the patient recognises that given an underlying pattern of anxiety, attempts to ungloss this pattern might involve the use of the documentary method of interpretation in order to suggest candidate unglosses, i.e., typical manifestations or appearances of such a pattern.

Noun

ungloss (plural unglosses)

1. A detail that has been made explicit through unglossing; an unglossing.
   • 1988, 48, Sociolinguistics - Volumes 17-18:

     The repetition of line 576-7 'always taken pride of my figure' in line 584 serves to mark the end of this gloss-within-an-ungloss followed by candidate ungloss and decision (lines 574-582) and to make a return to the larger ungloss which began in line 574.

   • 2016, Text and talk as social practice, page 67:

     The patient, in saying 'that's the strange thing' is making explicit the fact that, in selecting the possibility of disturbed sleeping habits as a manifestation of anxiety, the counsellor has correctly or legitimately used the documentary method. That is, the patient recognises that given an underlying pattern of anxiety, attempts to ungloss this pattern might involve the use of the documentary method of interpretation in order to suggest candidate unglosses, i.e., typical manifestations or appearances of such a pattern.

2. The act of unglossing.
   • 2009, Kate Eichhorn, Heather Milne, Prismatic Publics:

     I hadn't even realized what I had done in the original poems, but yes, I glossed over, and yes, made pretty. But then to ungloss, sort of like a poetic ungloss, I can think of fictional unglossings like Dorothy Allison's Bastard out of Carolina, but I can't think of a poetic unglossing of that kind of childhood narrative.

Anagrams

• sgluons