''sunder'' ▫ᴱᴺ Entries

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''sunder'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20260723122144-00-⌔

sunder - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

Adjective

sunder (comparative more sunder, superlative most sunder)

• (dialectal or obsolete) Sundry; separate; different.

Verb

sunder (third-person singular simple present sunders, present participle sundering, simple past and past participle sundered)

• (transitive) To break or separate or to break apart, especially with force.
  • ✤ Notwithstanding its terrifically wide sweep, (some thirty feet or more,) and the hissing vigor of its descent, sufficient to sunder these very walls of iron, still the fraying of my robe would be all that, for several minutes, it would accomplish.¹
  • ✤ In Taran’s hand the sundered bone had turned into gray dust, which he cast aside.²
• (intransitive) To part, separate.
  • ✤ Two souls, the shores wave-mocked of sundering seas: —³
  • ✤ … Carlo finally saw Everything, before it sunders into things; he saw Knowledge before it sunders into knowing; he saw Integrity before it sunders in integrals; he saw Unity before it sunders into units.⁴
• ✤ Such are we now.
• (UK, dialect, dated, transitive) To expose to the sun and wind.
  • ✤ Where a fair opportunity offers, and the grass is perfectly dry, the hipples are sundered; that is, broken out into beds in the usual manner, turned, and again got up into cocklets, of such size as the state of dryness requires.⁵
  • ✤ Except under abnormal conditions, protection can be afforded to a field by cutting a strip half a chain in width all round the field, with a reaper and binder for preference, when the crop is in the best condition for hay, and then ploughing or sunder -cutting the stubble.⁶
  • ✤ The trees and shrubs all around us began to show the signs of death; dried branches, leafless gray and molding wood. The ground here was as hard as stone, the dirt and dust dry as bone sundered in the desert scorch.⁷
  • ✤ The world, a good deal of it, sundered, scorched.⁸

Noun

sunder (plural sunders)

• a separation into parts; a division or severance
  • ✤ He would not stay for me to stand and gaze.
    I shook his hand and tore my heart in sunder
    And went with half my life about my ways.⁹

Pronunciation

• (General American) IPA: /ˈsʌndɚ/
• Audio (Southern England): 🔊
• Rhymes: -ʌndə(ɹ)

Etymology 1

From Middle English sunder, from Old English sundor- (“separate, different”), from Proto-Germanic ﹡sundraz (“isolated, particular, alone”), from Proto-Indo-European ﹡snter-, ﹡seni-, ﹡senu-, ﹡san- (“apart, without, for oneself”). Cognate with Old Saxon sundar (“particular, special”), Dutch zonder (“without”), German sonder- (“special”), German sondern (“to separate, set apart”), Old Norse sundr (“separate”), Danish sønder (“apart, asunder”), Latin sine (“without”).

Etymology 2

From Middle English sundren (“to separate, part, divide”), from Old English sundrian (“to separate, split, part, divide”), from Proto-Germanic ﹡sundrōną (“to separate”), from Proto-Indo-European ﹡sen(e)- (“separate, without”). Cognate with Scots sinder, sunder (“to separate, divide, split up”), Dutch zonderen (“to isolate”), German sondern (“to separate”), Swedish söndra (“to divide”). More at sundry.

Printed 2026-07-23.

(echo:: @ ⌗)

Footnotes

1. 1842, Edgar Allan Poe, The Pit and the Pendulum: ↩

2. 1967, Lloyd Alexander, Taran Wanderer: ↩

3. 1881 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Severed Selves, lines 8-9 ↩

4. 2003, Dean Barton, Searching for the Evergreen Man ‎${}^{[1]}$, Llumina Press, →ISBN, page 69: ↩

5. 1788, William Marshall, The Rural Economy of Yorkshire: ↩

6. 1941, The Queensland Agricultural and Pastoral Handbook, page 82: ↩

7. 2010, Stony Stern, Run Past The Hunter, page 143: ↩

8. 2013, Thomas Glave, Among the Bloodpeople: Politics and Flesh, page 165: ↩

9. 1939, Alfred Edward Housman, Additional Poems, VII, lines 2-4: ↩

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Secondary

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