unfriend

Formsunfriends, unfriending, unfriended

Pluralunfriends

1. 1
   verbtransitive

   To remove someone from one's list of contacts on a social networking site, ending the connection there.

   He chose to unfriend several former coworkers after leaving the company.

   After the heated thread, she quietly unfriended her cousin.

   Similardefriend

   Oppositefriend

   Note

   Here the break is a single action on a platform, and it runs one way: you unfriend someone, with the other person as the direct object. Defriend means the same thing. Nils Smith's Social Media Guide for Ministry (2013) separates it from milder steps, such as limiting or blocking someone's posts "without unfriending" them. Unfriending ends the connection itself, not just what appears in your feed. The verb is built like the older verb of falling out.

2. 2
   nouncountable

   A person who is not a friend; an enemy.

   He had made an unfriend of the magistrate through years of open insolence.

   The chieftain counted the rival clans among his unfriends.

   Similarnonfriend

   Oppositefriend

   Note

   Not a coinage of the internet age: Middle English unfreend, simply un- plus friend, with older relatives in Old English unwine and unfriþmann. It sits easily after verbs of being and parting, as in Elizabeth Gaskell's "we parted unfriends" and Tolkien's "we are their unfriends" in The Silmarillion. Walter Scott glosses it in The Fortunes of Nigel (1822): "unfriends—or, to be plain, enemies." It shares only its spelling with the social-media verb.

3. 3
   verbrareintransitive

   To break off a friendship; to cease being friends with another person.

   The partners decided to unfriend once their business interests sharply diverged.

   "I hope, sir, that we are not mutually Unfriended by this Difference which hath happened betwixt us."

   1659, Thomas Fuller, The Appeal of Injured Innocence

   Similarpart, split

   Note

   A rare verb, built with the un- that reverses an action, as in undo, not the un- that negates a noun, which is the one in the noun meaning 'enemy'. Dutch ontvrienden and German entfreunden are formed the same way. Thomas Fuller uses it in The Appeal of Injured Innocence (1659) for an estrangement both parties share: "we are not mutually Unfriended by this Difference." The sense is two people falling out, not one person dropping the other.

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