Dictionary

disinvolve en · VERB

Etymology

From dis- + involve.

Meanings

1. (transitive) To uncover; to unfold or unroll; to disentangle.
   • And for thee Creation universal calls aloud To disinvolve the moral world, and give To nature's renovation brighter charms. 1745, Edward Young, The Complaint: or, Night-Thoughts on Life, Death, & Immortality:
   • And for that second sense, it is indeed disinvolved of those former Difficulties 1672, Henry More, A brief Reply to a late Answer to Dr. Henry More his antidote against Idolatry:
   • This furnishes us with a multitude of cognitions, which. although they are not more than elucidations or explanations of that which had already been though in our conceptions (although in a confused manner) still, at least according to the form, are prized as new introspetions, notwithstanding that so far as respects their matter or content, they do not extend the conceptions which we have, but only disinvolve them . 1848, Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, page 7:
   • Constable and Turner were needed to reassert the potentialities of natural colour and to disinvolve the miracle of light from the good taste of academic tone. 2017, Edward Thomas, British Country Life in Autumn and Winter:
2. To terminate the involvement of.
   • Given a variety of urgent and vital global problems requiring attention and co-operation of the super-powers and the world communitiy in their solution, can the super-powers take a decision to disinvolve themselves from the Viet-Nam-Indo-China tangle and to use all their influence with the local parties concerned to facilitate such disinvolvement? 1966, Select Documents on International Affairs, page 123:
   • Has the author processed his subject in such a way as to exclude, to pacify, to disinvolve the reader? 1974, Virgil Grillo, Charles Dickens' Sketches by Boz: End in the Beginning, page 56:
   • I was never physically attracted to Al, and I was comfortable with him for two reasons: I genuinely respected his intelligence and wanted to learn fro him and discuss music and literature and philosophy with him; also I knew it would take him weeks to make any physical overtures, and it would, at such a time in the future, be simple to disinvolve myself. As yet, we haven't even held hands! 2012, Susan Sontag, Reborn: Early Diaries 1947-1963:
   • Disinvolve yourself, if you can come to it, disinvolve, dissociate, hold a watching brief. 2015, Stevie Smith, Over The Frontier:

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