Dictionary

unpack en · VERB

Pronunciation

• (Southern-England) audio
• /ʌnˈpæk/

Etymology

From Middle English unpakken, equivalent to un- + pack. Compare Saterland Frisian uutpakje (“to unpack”), West Frisian útpakke (“to unpack”), Dutch uitpakken (“to unpack”), German auspacken (“to unpack”).

Meanings

1. (transitive) To remove from a package or container, particularly with respect to items that had previously been arranged closely and securely in a pack.
   • They didn't have time to unpack their bags before going out to dinner.
2. (intransitive) To empty containers that had been packed.
   • They didn't have time to unpack before going to dinner.
3. (figuratively, transitive) To analyze a concept or a text; to explain.
   • There may be another argument here, if we had time to unpack it, about modernism and the rise of the middle classes. 2013 September 20, Anne Enright, “A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride – review”, in The Guardian:
   • Yet few Americans — including the president — understand how global trade works, both how it can help our economy and how some can be left behind. Let’s try to unpack a few of the complexities. 2019 October 17, Steven Rattner, “Unpacking the Trade Deficit”, in The New York Times, →ISSN:
   • From a gender reveal to a secret ceremony and rifts with other royal family members, there was a lot to unpack from the interview 2021 March 8, Helen Sullivan, “Meghan and Harry: 12 things we learned from the Oprah special”, in The Guardian:
4. (intransitive, of a segment such as a vowel) To undergo separation of its features into distinct segments.
   • The objective of these corpora was to check whether vowels other than nasal vowels systematically unpack in L1s that do not allow them. 2011, John A. Goldsmith, Jason Riggle, Alan C. L. Yu, editors, The Handbook of Phonological Theory:
   • The rounded vowels [y] and [œ/ə] in Russian seem to unpack as glide-vowel sequences in words borrowed from French and German, […] 2000, Language, volume 76, numbers 1-2, page 337:
   • Whereas the high vowels /ʏ, y/ unpack, the mid vowels /œ, ø/ are adapted as single segments in these languages (see examples in (36) for Vietnamese (Barker 1969) and (37) for Fon (Gbeto 2000)). […] French /y/ → Vietnamese /wi/ accu [a'ky] → ac-quy [ak kwi] 2008, Katrin Dohlus, The Role of Phonology and Phonetics in Loanword Adaptation, page 73:
5. (transitive) To decompress (data).
   • Packages […] are often archived and compressed using the zip utility; you can unpack these with the unzip command[…] 2005, Matthias Kalle Dalheimer, Matt Welsh, Running Linux:

Forms

Antonyms

pack

Deriveds

reunpack · unpackable · unpacker

Hyponyms

zip

Translations (31)

ja 解く (to remove from a package) · cy dadbacio (to remove from a package) · pl rozpakowywać (to remove from a package) · it sballare (to remove from a package) · pl rozpakować (to remove from a package) · fr dépaqueter (to remove from a package) · tr boşaltmak (to remove from a package) · hu kicsomagol (to remove from a package) · ru распако́вывать (to remove from a package) · fi purkaa (to remove from a package) · de entpacken (to remove from a package) · sv packa upp (to remove from a package) · no pakke ut (to remove from a package) · it disimballare (to remove from a package) · cmn 解開 /解开 (to remove from a package) · ca desempaquetar (to remove from a package) · es desempaquetar (to remove from a package) · fr déballer (to remove from a package) · cs vybalit (to remove from a package) · bg разопаковам (to remove from a package) · ga folmhaigh (to remove from a package) · es desempacar (to remove from a package) · de auspacken (to remove from a package) · cmn 拆開 /拆开 (to remove from a package) · no pakke opp (to remove from a package) · cs rozbalit (to remove from a package) · ga díphacáil (to remove from a package) · es deshacer (to remove from a package) · ru распакова́ть (to remove from a package) · pt desempacotar (to remove from a package) · ca desembalar (to remove from a package)