Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- v. To disconnect: uncouple railroad cars.
- v. To set loose or release from a couple.
- v. To come or break loose.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- In organ-playing, to separate or disjoin by throwing off the coupler between two keyboards which have been mechanically joined in action. See organ, 6.
- To loose, as dogs from their couples, or railway-cars from their couplings; set loose; disjoin.
- To break loose; exert influence unrestrained.
Wiktionary
- v. To disconnect or detach one thing from another.
- v. To come loose.
GNU Webster's 1913
- v. To loose, as dogs, from their couples; also, to set loose; to disconnect; to disjoin.
- v. To roam at liberty.
WordNet 3.0
- v. disconnect or separate
Examples
“We would fix the tax code to uncouple health insurance from employment and let people purchase their own mix of services and coverage.”
The Wall Street Journal: The Myth of Runaway Health Spending
“If you uncouple the gun issue from other liberal/conservative squabbles you will find that respect for our firearms bearing heritage is way broader than other issues.”
“The [UnitedHealth] program is banking on the assumption that if we uncouple paying for drugs with paying for care that doctors will do what they do best, which is doctor.”
The Wall Street Journal: In Treating Cancer, Insurer Tries New Way to Pay Docs
“Argument by Insignification — For any given argument where an overwhelmingly sufficient number of points of evidence is advanced to justify an assertion as to theme or subtext, and where these points of evidence are undeniably manifest in the text, a rejection of significance for each notable element of a work, large or small, recurrent or isolated, may be employed to uncouple the link between evidence and interpretation on each count.”
“The crowd began to uncouple from their conversations, and Floyd launched his dinghy onto the dark waters of the Chateau de Ville Ballroom and Function Facilities.”
“In November, when Adafruit offered a bounty to the first person who figured out how to uncouple the Kinect from the Xbox 360, a Microsoft spokesperson told CNET: Microsoft does not condone the modification of its products.”
The Washington Post: Microsoft announces developers kit due this spring
“• We should be allowed to uncouple a "to" from its verb with impunity.”
“And if we occasionally want to uncouple our mental state from our actual situation in the world (e.g. by taking powerful drugs, drinking great quantities of alcohol, etc.) we don't want this to render us permanently delusional, however pleasant such delusion might be.”
The Huffington Post: Sam Harris: Toward a Science of Morality
“ The crowd began to uncouple from their conversations, and Floyd launched his dinghy onto the dark waters of the Chateau de Ville Ballroom and Function Facilities.”
“For a moment, let us uncouple Maya Arulpragasam's third album from the media hoo-hah that's attended its release.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘uncouple’.
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Undo
A list of terms that denote separating one thing from another, or deconstructing a thing into its parts or to a former state. E.g., untie, divorce, unscramble.
untie, divorce, unscramble, disunite, disjoin, undo, separate, disassemble, uncouple, unhitch, disassociate, disaffiliate and 178 more...
sockfullofpennies Decouple refers to the removal of a logical association: decouple ideology from foreign policy.
Uncouple refers to the removal of a physical connection: uncouple the train cars.
Jan 27, 2007