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OneKitly

untie

verbcommon in dialogue

  • //ʌnˈtaɪ//

To loosen, as something interlaced or knotted; to disengage the parts of.

verb

  1. 1

    To loosen, as something interlaced or knotted; to disengage the parts of.

    to untie a knot

    Haſt thou the pretty vvorme of Nylus [an asp] there, / That killes and paines not? / […] / Come thou mortal vvretch, / VVith thy ſharpe teeth this knot intrinſicate, / Of life at once vntye: Poore venomous Foole, / Be angry, and diſpatch.

    Sacharissa's captive fain / Would untie his iron chain.

  2. 2

    To free from fastening or from restraint; to let loose; to unbind.

    Though you untie the winds, and let them fight / Against the churches.

    All the evils of an untied tongue we put upon the accounts of drunkenness.

  3. 3

    To resolve; to unfold; to clear.

    They quicken sloth, perplexities untie.

  4. 4

    To become untied or loosed.

  5. 5

    In the Perl programming language, to undo the process of tying, so that a variable uses default instead of custom functionality.

    After you finish with the INI file, all you need to do is untie the hash. Then you really are finished!

Etymology

From Middle English untien, unteyen, untyȝen, untiȝen, from Old English untīġan (“to untie”), equivalent to un- + tie.

Forms

past tense
untied
past participle
untied
present participle
untying
third person singular
unties
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).