unwill

English

Etymology 1

From un- (“lack or absence of”) +‎ will (noun). Compare Dutch onwil.

Noun

unwill (plural unwills)

1. Lack or absence of will; willlessness; undesire.
   • 1895, Kuno Meyer, The Voyage of Bran, Son of Febal, to the Land of the Living:

     Woe to him that shall be under His unwill!

   • 1988, Daniel G. Marowski, Contemporary Literary Criticism, page 5:

     They are major poets out of whak, twisted and balked by unwill.

   • 2005, Melodie Calvert, Jennifer Terry, Processed Lives:

     The first challenge to shaping and taming this emerging world is the will itself and the human problem of unwill, especially in relation to femininity.

   • 2009, Amanda du Preez, Gendered Bodies and New Technologies:

     If women are showing "technological ineptitude" and are "disinclined towards technology" by showing an "unwill" to co-operate technologically, does this merely indicate stupidity?

Etymology 2

From un- (reverse action prefix) +‎ will (verb).

Verb

unwill (third-person singular simple present unwills, present participle unwilling, simple past and past participle unwilled)

1. (transitive) To annul or reverse by an act of the will.
   • 1867, Dante Alighieri, “Canto II”, in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, transl., The Divine Comedy, volume I (Inferno), Boston, Mass.: Ticknor and Fields, →OCLC, page 8, lines 37–42:

     And as he is, who unwills what he willed, / And by new thoughts doth his intention change, / So that from his design he quite withdraws, / Such I became, upon that dark hillside, / Because, in thinking, I consumed the emprise, / Which was so very prompt in the beginning.

   • 1969, Ernest Gordon Rupp, ‎Philip Saville Watson, Luther and Erasmus: Free Will and Salvation:

     But if it can will and unwill, it can also love and hate, and if it can love and hate, it can also in some small degree do the works of the law and believe the gospel.

   • 1990, Thomas J. J. Altizer, Genesis and Apocalypse, page 83:

     Accordingly, a Gnostic will to glorification is a will to unwill, a will to unwill itself , and to unwill itself as a free and an active will, a will whose very actuality freely enacts a continual enslavement of itself.

   • 2007, Joan Frank, The Great Far Away, page 167:

     You can't back up like a dumptruck and unwill the actions of the past, much as we may long to. And you can never unwill children — though some people like to make such remarks when they're in great distress or trying to show off, or in some other desperate state.