unsort

English

Etymology

From un- +‎ sort, apparently by confusion of unravel, untangle or similar and sort.

Verb

unsort (third-person singular simple present unsorts, present participle unsorting, simple past and past participle unsorted)

1. (transitive, nonstandard) To sort out; to resolve.
   • 2003, Edwin S. Gaustad, Mark A. Noll, A Documentary History of Religion in America to 1877, page 54:

     In his letter to Virginia's governor excerpted below, Rolfe tries to unsort the mixture of motives that led to his decision to marry Pocahantas.

   • 2008, Susan McGeown, Call Me Elle, page 48:

     I try to unsort this big tangle of things that all of a sudden I've tripped over.

2. (computing) To shuffle a data structure so that it is no longer sorted.
   • 1999, Jesus Castagnetto, Professional PHP Programming, page 162:

     And what if we want to unsort an array? The shuffle ( ) function uses PHP's random number generator to re-arrange the elements of an array randomly.

Anagrams

• Ruston, tornus, tourns