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.
-
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.
See Examples For:
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
But this is nothing to what follows; for being obliged to make his sense intelligible, we are forced to untune our own verses that we may give his meaning to the reader.
From Discourses on Satire and on Epic Poetry by Dryden, John
Take but degree away, untune that string, And hark what discord follows!
From Troilus and Cressida by Shakespeare, William
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)
He did not, as has been said of Horace, wilfully untune his harp when he commenced satirist.
From The Dramatic Works of John Dryden, Volume 1 With a Life of the Author by Saintsbury, George
Her albums — particularly “Energy Field” from 2010, which occasionally calls to mind drum-less heavy metal or an untuned violin — unfurl as tone poems, giving her changing surroundings a spiritual gravitas.
From New York Times ● Mar. 16, 2023
Despite widespread criticisms of punk at the time — untuned guitars, bad playing of instruments, too much screaming — Zientara maintained an optimism about where the music would go.
From Washington Post ● Oct. 3, 2021
At National Sawdust, he will perform an intimate augmented solo set that asks audiences to “reconcile untuned guitar noise and ballad singing.”
From New York Times ● Oct. 6, 2016
And Bill just sat down by my little untuned, school piano and started playing it.
From Time ● Oct. 26, 2011
I said, “I fear the humidity has untuned me.”
From "The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume I: The Pox Party" by M.T. Anderson
As an example of the cataclysm that would result from Webster’s untuning of the string, Macdonald worried that the dictionaries of 1988 would list without comment the solecisms mischievious, inviduous, and nuclear pronounced as “nucular.”
From "The Sense of Style" by Steven Pinker
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.
