disinter

Borrowed from French désenterrer.

• IPA^(key): /ˌdɪsɪnˈtɜː(ɹ)/

  • Audio (Southern England)

    (file)

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

1. (transitive) To take out of the grave or tomb.

   Synonyms: unbury, exhume, dig up

   Antonym: inter

2. (transitive, figurative) To bring out, as from a grave or hiding place; to bring from obscurity into view.
   • 1870, James Thomson, The City of Dreadful Night:

     Why disinter dead faith from mouldering hidden?

   • 1886 January 5, Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, London: Longmans, Green, and Co., →OCLC:

     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; lock-fast drawers stood open; and on the hearth there lay a pile of grey 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.

   • 2001 May 12, Robert Potts, “The poet at play”, in The Guardian‎, →ISSN:

     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.

• in stride, inditers, neritids, nitrides