''disinter'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20260717141042-00-⌔

disinter - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

Verb

disinter (third-person singular simple present disinters, present participle disinterring, simple past and past participle disinterred)

• (transitive) To take out of the grave or tomb.
  • ✤ Synonyms: unbury, exhume, dig up
  • ✤ Antonym: inter
• (transitive, figurative) To bring out, as from a grave or hiding place; to bring from obscurity into view.
  • ✤ Why disinter dead faith from mouldering hidden?¹
  • ✤ At this moment, however, the rooms bore every mark of having been recently and hurriedly ransacked; clothes lay about the floor, with their pockets inside out; lockfast drawers stood open; and on the hearth there lay a pile of gray ashes, as though many papers had been burned. From these embers the inspector disinterred the butt end of a green cheque book, which had resisted the action of the fire; […]²
  • ✤ In his lectures he is equally wide-ranging and allusive, making strange links and analogies between apparently unrelated texts and ideas, and disinterring etymologies which writers cannot have been aware of.³

Etymology

Borrowed from French désenterrer.

Pronunciation

• IPA: /ˌdɪsɪnˈtɜː(ɹ)/
  • Audio (Southern England): 🔊

Printed 2026-07-17.

(echo:: @ ⌗)

Footnotes

1. 1870, James Thomson, The City of Dreadful Night: ↩

2. 1886 January 5, Robert Louis Stevenson, “The Carew Murder Case”, in Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, London: Longmans, Green, and Co., →OCLC, page 42: ↩

3. 2001 May 12, Robert Potts, “The poet at play”, in The Guardian ‎${}^{[1]}$, →ISSN: ↩