unpreach

English

Etymology

From un- +‎ preach.

Verb

unpreach (third-person singular simple present unpreaches, present participle unpreaching, simple past and past participle unpreached)

1. (transitive) To undo or overthrow (something) by preaching; to recant (something preached before).
   • 1701 January (indicated as 1700), [Daniel Defoe], “(please specify the page)”, in The True-Born Englishman. A Satyr, [London: s.n.], →OCLC:

     The clergy their own principles denied: Unpreach'd their non-resisting cant, and pray'd / Their liberty and property's so dear

   • 1855, Charles Kingsley, “How They Took the Pearls at Margarita”, in Westward Ho!: Or, The Voyages and Adventures of Sir Amyas Leigh, Knight, […], volume II, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire: Macmillan & Co., →OCLC, page 269:

     [Y]et for a priest of the Church of England, […] to show the white feather in the hour of need, is to unpreach in one minute all that he had been preaching his life-long.

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 The imported definitions may be significantly out of date, and any more recent senses may be completely missing.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 “unpreach”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.)