English edit

Etymology edit

un- +‎ fail

Verb edit

unfail (third-person singular simple present unfails, present participle unfailing, simple past and past participle unfailed)

  1. (uncommon, nonstandard) To undo or reverse the failure of; to return to an unfailed state.
    • 1997, Cay S. Horstmann, Practical Object-Oriented Development in C++ and Java, Wiley:
      Once an input stream has failed, it is very hard to "unfail" it. You can clear the failbit and take your chances, but that is pretty useless in practice. If you cannot tolerate failure, read the input file as a sequence of strings and then parse the strings.
    • 2007, United States, United States House Committee on Financial Services, Federal housing response to Hurricane Katrina: hearing before the Committee on Financial Services, U.S. House of Representatives, One Hundred Tenth Congress, first session, February 06, 2007, page 135:
      [] the problem with HUD running the Housing Authority has to be addressed, because you can't expect the agency that has failed, to unfail.
    • 2007, David Kerr, Liu Fei, Fei Liu, The International Politics of EU-China Relations, Oxford University Press, page 305:
      So-called failed states were perceived as breeding grounds for transnational violence, so great powers began to compete for the right to "unfail" them, to make or re-make their regimes to eliminate security contagion.
    • 2017, Katharina Motyl, Regina Schober, The Failed Individual: Amid Exclusion, Resistance, and the Pleasure of Non-Conformity, Campus Verlag, →ISBN, page 139:
      Trying to Unfail the Homeless Individual – Wibke Schniedermann.

Anagrams edit