Dictionary

unframe en · VERB

Etymology

From un- + frame.

Meanings

1. To take apart or destroy; to unmake.
   • All day Sunday to frame and unframe penitent speeches. 1907, Kate Douglas Wiggin, Homespun Tales:
   • At their approach his heart alters its motion; his blood stops from its common course; his sinews are all relaxed, which entirely unframes his reason, and makes him a stranger to his own inclination, which, struggling with his wavering resolution, occasions a debate between hope and fear; 1797, The Children's Miscellany, page 289:
   • […] or in your converse with others, may be, ungodly persons, whereby casting off the sense of this, we often cast the honour of our profession to the ground, and by our sinful neglects or compliances, unframe our selves; 1677, Alexander Carmichael, Believers Mortification of Sin by the Spirit, page 28:
   • A lifeless lump, unfashioned, and unframed, / Of jarring seeds 1717, John Dryden [et al.], “Book 1”, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses in Fifteen Books. […], London: […] Jacob Tonson, […], →OCLC:
2. To remove from a frame
   • Do not unframe mechanically damaged paintings. Only unframe if glass front protection is splintered. 2008, ICOM Committee for Conservation, 15th Triennial Conference, New Delhi, 22-26 September 2008, page 804:
   • “We have only to unframe the picture,” he said. “ I remember that on the edge of the canvas there is a streak of paint, gray paint that went beyond the edge of the stretcher.” 1940, Max White, Tiger Tiger, page 335:
   • More than six or seven sketches were made of this subject before I did the finished drawing, and even now I find myself tempted to unframe it to go on working at it. 1983, The Artist - Volume 98, page 31:
3. To make HTML code that appears within a frameset accessible to browsers that do not support framesets.
   • To prevent this from happening, it's important to unframe pages for external links or internal links to frameset documents. The easiest way to unframe pages is to use either the _blank or _top special targets discussed earlier. 2000, Anamary Ehlen, HTML Complete, page 290:
4. To show the innocence of one who has been framed.
   • I decided to unframe the frame-up, to obtain Miss Holiday's acquittal, and to clearly document Mr. Levy's status and function in the case. 1965, J.W. Enrlich, A Life in my Hands, page 148:
5. To free one's viewpoint of its ideological or cultural frame of reference.
   • To unframe hierarchies of excellence and of universal value that privilege one strand of cultural production while committing every other mode to cultural oblivion, as claims the not fully articulated accusation in October, does not mean that one is launching an undifferentiated universalism in which everything is equal to everything else. Rather it opens up the possibilities for analyzing the politics that stand behind each particular relativist model and of differentiating between those rather than between the supposed value of objects and images. 2006, Joanne Morra, Marquard Smith, Visual Culture: What is visual culture studies?, page 230:
   • Drawing renews wonder and unframes vision. 2022, Rose Montgomery-Whicher, The Phenomenology of Observation Drawing:
   • In order to understand the contemporary ideological dynamics of World Englishes, we need to unframe particular understandings of Englishes which have mobilized past and recent work in the field (even as we further build on them). 2021, Rani Rubdy, Ruanni Tupas, Mario Saraceni, Bloomsbury World Englishes Volume 2: Ideologies:
   • One way to achieve this is to go beyond canonical representations of Miinter, to unframe her from the location within the modern confines of modernism, and thus to unframe her from victimhood. 1994, Women Studies Abstracts - Volume 23, Issues 1-4, page 65:

Forms