untune

American  

[uhn-toon, -tyoon] / ʌnˈtun, -ˈtjun /

verb (used with object)

untuned, untuning

1. to render or cause to become out of tune.

   Changes in weather can untune a violin.

2. to discompose; upset, as the mind or emotions.

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Etymology

Origin of untune

First recorded in 1590–1600; un- ² + tune

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

untune untuned untuning

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

I drawn nothing lately?— is the work-bag finished?—how accomplished I am!—has the man been to untune the harpsichord?—does it look as if I had been playing on it?

From Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan — Volume 01 by Moore, Thomas

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

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)

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