untune
Americanverb (used with object)
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to render or cause to become out of tune.
Changes in weather can untune a violin.
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to discompose; upset, as the mind or emotions.
Etymology
Origin of untune
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.
The heat could untune a piano half a tone in two hours and rot a dress suit in a matter of days.
From Time Magazine Archive
Take but degree away, untune that string, And, hark, what discord follows!
From Shakespearean Tragedy Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth by Bradley, A. C. (Andrew Cecil)
Their natural tendency, from the very base of British society, and through all its strongly built gradations, is to look upward: they are not apt to "untune degree."
From Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists by Froude, James Anthony
"So when the last and dreadful hour This crumbling pageant shall devour, The trumpet shall be heard on high The dead shall live, the living die, And Music shall untune the sky."
From The Bible Story by Hall, Newton Marshall
To my ear the untune is agony; to my music, a discord in my day is death to what would have been written that day.
From A Woman's Will by Caliga, I. H. (Isaac Henry)
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.
