undevil

English

Etymology

From un- +‎ devil.

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /ʌnˈdɛvɪl/

Verb

undevil (third-person singular simple present undevils, present participle undeviling or undevilling, simple past and past participle undeviled or undevilled)

1. (archaic, transitive) To free from possession by a devil or evil spirit; to exorcise.
   • 1655, Thomas Fuller, The Church-history of Britain; […], London: […] Iohn Williams […], →OCLC, (please specify |book=I to XI):

     The boy having gotten a habit of counterfeiting […] would not be undevilled by all their exorcisms.

   • 1841, Mrs. Gore (Catherine Grace Frances), Cecil:

     [...] for the following day, the flowers were watered a quarter of an hour earlier than usual, and the bulfinch was allowed to perch on her finger and chirruped to, with a degree of innocent tenderness that would have undeviled Mephistophiles.

   • 1893, Thomas De Witt Talmage, From Manger to Throne:

     It is hardly more wondrous to undevil a man than it is to restore reason, at a word, to the brain-distracted, the ravening, frenzied bedlamite — the re-enthronement of a mind lost in the darkness of shattered intellect.

Derived terms

• undevilled

Part or all of this entry has been imported from the 1913 edition of Webster’s Dictionary, which is now free of copyright and hence in the public domain. The imported definitions may be significantly out of date, and any more recent senses may be completely missing.
(See the entry for “undevil”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.)

Anagrams

• unlived