unfold

Formsunfolds, unfolding, unfolded

Pluralunfolds

1. 1
   verbtransitive

   To open out something that has been folded flat.

   Carefully unfold the delicate tissue paper before tracing the pattern.

   He unfolded the napkin and spread it across his lap.

   Similaropen, unfurl, spread

   Oppositefold

   Note

   The literal sense, and the oldest: Old English unfealdan, built from un- and fold, so the word has always meant reversing a fold. Maps, tablecloths and new dresses are its everyday objects. George Herbert stretches it to a face in The Temple (1633): "Unfold thy forehead gathered into frowns," a plea for a brow smoothed flat. The same image of opening out lets plans and stories unfold.

2. 2
   verbintransitive

   To open out from a folded state.

   The map's creases slowly unfold when the sheet is laid flat.

   The origami crane began to unfold as the paper relaxed.

   Similaropen, unfurl

   Oppositefold

3. 3
   verbintransitive

   To turn out or develop gradually as events progress.

   Negotiations continued to unfold throughout the week.

   The drama unfolded before a stunned audience.

   Similardevelop, evolve, progress, proceed

   Note

   Here the verb takes no object. Events, stories and crises do the unfolding themselves, and the progressive suits it well, as in Simon Romero's New York Times line of 2013: "The protests in Brazil are unfolding." It fits anything that develops step by step, and Scott Tobias uses it for the backward-running scenes of Memento. When a person does the revealing, use the transitive 'reveal' meaning.

4. 4
   verbtransitive

   To reveal or explain something fully, bringing out all its details through gradual, successive development.

   The lawyer will unfold the entire case before the jury tomorrow.

   Her memoir unfolds the events of a turbulent decade with quiet precision.

   Similarreveal, disclose, explain, present, recount

   Oppositeconceal

   Note

   A storyteller's verb with a long stage history. The Ghost asks Hamlet to "lend thy serious hearing / To what I shall unfold," and Twelfth Night has "Unfold the passion of my love." Its object is something hidden or intricate, such as designs, principles, a case or a tale. The sense carries the idea of disclosure in stages, laid out piece by piece, rather than a single blunt announcement.

5. 5
   verbtransitive

   To release sheep or other livestock from the fold or pen in which they are kept.

   Similarrelease

   Oppositefold, pen

   Note

   A separate word that happens to share the spelling. It joins un- to fold in its farming sense, the pen where sheep are shut in. To unfold sheep is to let them out, and to fold them is to pen them again. Nothing is spread or opened flat, so it has no tie to undoing a fold. Talk of livestock and pens tells the two apart.

6. 6
   verbtransitive

   To reassemble a line of text that was split across several lines.

   The text editor will unfold the wrapped code into a single continuous line.

   Developers often unfold long URLs that the mail client split across lines.

   Oppositefold

   Note

   A text-processing term. When a long logical line is wrapped or folded to fit a width, unfolding joins the pieces back into one unbroken line. Mail headers and long URLs are the usual cases. Its antonym is fold, the operation that did the splitting, so the two words name the two halves of a round trip.

7. 7
   nouncountable

   In functional programming, a higher-order function that builds a data structure from a seed value: the opposite of a fold.

   An unfold generates an infinite stream of numbers from a single seed.

   The library provides an unfold that lazily produces each element on demand.

   Oppositefold

   Note

   Functional programmers treat it as the mirror image of a fold. A fold consumes a list or tree down to a single value, while an unfold starts from a seed and grows a structure, applying a step function until a stopping condition holds. Category theory calls it an anamorphism, the dual of the fold. Because it works corecursively, it can describe infinite, lazily produced streams.

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