untell

English[edit]

untell (third-person singular simple present untells, present participle untelling, simple past and past participle untold)

(transitive) To withdraw or retract (something told); to never have told.
- 1993, Jack Selzer, Understanding scientific prose, page 54:
  Narrative untells itself by multiplying itself into discontinuous "turns" that cannot be resolved into a continuous story.
- 1998, Diane DuBose Brunner, Between the masks: resisting the politics of essentialism, page 29:
  Trinh (1991) writes that untelling the stories of privilege and marginality is a form of displacement that takes a long time.
- 2004, Patrick Bizzaro, More lights than one: on the fiction of Fred Chappell, page 103:
  And once his story was told, it was told; there was no way to untell it, no way to make himself look good.
(transitive, archaic) To undo or reverse the counting of; to count back.
- 1607, Thomas Heywood, A Woman Killed with Kindness:
  That Time could turn up his swift sandy glass, / To untell the days, and to redeem these hours.