untune
Americanverb (used with object)
-
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
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 George Saintsbury
Take but degree away, untune that string, And hark what discord follows!
From Troilus and Cressida by William Shakespeare
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 I. H. (Isaac Henry) Caliga
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 James Anthony Froude
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
His voice was a whine that sounded like an untuned fiddle.
From "October Sky" by Homer Hickam
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
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