sunder
Americanverb (used with object)
-
sunders,
present (3rd person singular)
-
sundered,
past participle, past
-
sundering
present participle
verb (used without object)
-
sunders,
present (3rd person singular)
-
sundered,
past participle, past
-
sundering
present participle
verb
noun
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Participles
Conjugated Forms
Present
-
sundersimple
-
sunderssimple
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have sunderedperfect
-
has sunderedperfect
-
am sunderingprogressive
-
are sunderingprogressive
-
is sunderingprogressive
-
have been sunderingperfect progressive
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has been sunderingperfect progressive
Past
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sunderedsimple
-
had sunderedperfect
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was sunderingprogressive
-
were sunderingprogressive
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had been sunderingperfect progressive
Future
Etymology
Origin of sunder
First recorded before 900; Middle English sundren, Old English sundrian; cognate with German sondern, Old Norse sundra; see sundry
Explanation
Think of the word sunder as violently tearing something apart. A frequent line in a wedding ceremony is, "What God has joined together, let no man tear asunder." Keep that in mind, and you'll have the meaning of the word. Throughout its history, the word sunder has carried the same basic meaning, "to tear or break apart." It is of good Germanic stock, coming from the Old English verb sundrian. All of the related Germanic words, then and now, carry the idea of separation, usually in a violent or unpleasant manner.
Vocabulary lists containing sunder
"What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?" by Frederick Douglass
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Beowulf vocabulary
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"The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet," Vocabulary from Act 5
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
Democratic consultant Jim Ross and his Republican consultant brother, Tom, say their affection and mutual regard is something no campaign can ever sunder — even in these contentious times.
From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 7, 2025
Each event had the potential to sunder the world.
From New York Times ● Sep. 24, 2021
Importing market logic into a longer-term, less impersonal relationship makes no sense, and in fact, it tends to sunder those relations.
From Washington Post ● Feb. 26, 2019
Any move to sunder diplomatic relations again would recreate a long-standing irritant for the region.
From Economist ● Oct. 5, 2017
Taran expected Fflewddur’s harp strings to sunder at any moment.
From "The Book of Three" by Lloyd Alexander
By the memoir’s end, that tidal wave sunders the relationship among the sisters and destroys the world of their childhood.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Nov. 14, 2025
Ebola sunders the bonds that make us human.
From Slate ● Sep. 19, 2014
Each autumn - or earlier, if summer is particularly disappointing - there's an argument that sunders households up and down the country.
From BBC ● Sep. 17, 2013
The valour from virtue that sunders, Is 'reft of its nobler part; And Lancelot's arm may work wonders, But braver is Galahad's heart.
From Poems by Adam Lindsay Gordon by Marcus Andrew Hislop Clarke
On the lean, green edge for ever, Where the blank chalk touched the turf, The child played on, alone, divine, As a child plays on the last line That sunders sand and surf.
From The Ballad of the White Horse by G. K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton
The partition that once sealed out the cranks and mediocrities has been permanently sundered.
From Slate ● Mar. 6, 2026
The sundered ship fans out like a deck of cards then collapses, smoldering.
From New York Times ● Mar. 29, 2024
But when the university ordered them off campus, their sense of safety was sundered.
From Los Angeles Times ● Nov. 27, 2023
Genealogy search registries can repair sundered ancestral bonds, reuniting relatives yearning for kinship.
From Salon ● Feb. 26, 2023
It sundered, and a pale spindle of light gleamed between his opened arms, a faint oval reaching from the ground up to the height of his raised hands.
From "A Wizard of Earthsea" by Ursula K. Le Guin
We’ve met the third sundering already, the Mother of All Partitions—that of India and Pakistan.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jan. 30, 2026
Although the region had been volcanically dormant for centuries, the tectonic sundering happening in the depths meant that the latest eruptions have long been in the works.
From National Geographic ● Jul. 24, 2023
Taranti’s sundering from her beloved spirit family and Paranto’s inability to speak to his dead father in waking life are just single moments of personal drama in a vast historical shift.
From Scientific American ● Jan. 5, 2023
Ironically, “the” Reformation as the sundering of Christian unity was at least in part the product of prosaic reformations already occurring within the Church.
From Textbooks ● Jan. 1, 2020
For the first time the evocation of the Founder saddened me, and the campus seemed to rush past me, fast retreating, like the fading of a dream at the sundering of slumber.
From "Invisible Man" by Ralph Ellison
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
