unpen

English

Etymology

From un- +‎ pen.

Verb

unpen (third-person singular simple present unpens, present participle unpenning, simple past and past participle unpenned)

  1. (transitive) To release (from a pen).
    • 1902, Barbara Baynton, edited by Sally Krimmer and Alan Lawson, Bush Studies (Portable Australian Authors: Barbara Baynton), St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, published 1980, page 16:
      Her supplies, a billy of tea and scraps of salt beef and damper (her dog got the beef), gave out the first day, though that was as nothing to her compared with the bleat of the penned sheep, for it was summer and droughty, and her dog could not unpen them.
    • 2010, Gayl Teller, “Note Carriers”, in Inside the Embrace: Poems, Cincinnati, Oh.: Cherry Grove, →ISBN, page 80:
      “What does a girl need college for?” my father’s words come rippling to me, from way back when he sorted mail, in the wave from my maillady, as I wave back with spring in my lungs, out jogging, unpenned from writing my reviews of Molly Peacock’s Original Love and Private I for the Y […]

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