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unsettling

From Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

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Pronunciation

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Adjective

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unsettling (comparative more unsettling, superlative most unsettling)

  1. That makes one troubled or uneasy; disquieting or distressing.
    • April 5 2022, Tina Brown, “How Princess Diana’s Dance With the Media Impacted William and Harry”, in Vanity Fair[1]:
      More unsettling was the origin story of the infamous tell-all book Princess in Love. Diana claimed to be outraged in 1994 when Daily Express journalist Anna Pasternak spilled the beans of her affair with former army officer James Hewitt []
      adapted from the book The Palace Papers, published 2022 by Penguin Books

Derived terms

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Translations

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Noun

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unsettling (plural unsettlings)

  1. The weakening of some previously established system or norm.
    • 1850, Thomas Keightley, The Fairy Mythology, London: H.G. Bohn, page 305:
      A farmer in Hampshire was sorely distressed by the unsettling of his barn. However straightly over-night he laid his sheaves on the threshing-floor for the application of the morning's flail, when morning came, all was topsy-turvy, higgledy-piggledy, though the door remained locked, and there was no sign whatever of irregular entry.
    • 2013, Krishna Sen, Maila Stivens, Gender and Power in Affluent Asia, page 19:
      But reconstructing theory has proved more problematic than feminists might have hoped, even as their efforts played an important if sometimes overlooked part in post-modern unsettlings of theories in the West.

Verb

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unsettling

  1. present participle and gerund of unsettle