unspool
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 1.26 in modern English
9
Scrabble Score
7
Letters
2
Syllables
6
Unique Chars
Meaning
verb
To reduce the thrust of a jet engine to idle in flight.
Example Sentences
- "Next, unspool twenty cubits of the thin silver wire thread and cut this length in half. If you have less than twenty cubits, unspool all you have, and cut it in two equal parts."
- "He lifted out the roll of tickets and began to unspool a dozen."
- "During this 14-second period, the airplane accelerated to about 173 KIAS, and the first officer retarded the throttles. By 1805:15, despite the instructions in the Delta L-1011 Pilot Operating Manual (POM), which states, “do not unspool the engines,” all three engines were either at, or very near, flight idle EPR and remained at that thrust level until 1805:22."
- "Let all the films of Keaton and Wenders unspool blackly across your mind like the negative of the white line still unspooling down a road in God's imagination, long after the end of his road movie of the end of the world."
- "Trailers for upcoming movies unspool—The Nutty Professor is playing on Tuesday, along with Cinderfella."
- "The landscape and the living figures of that summer, as in some umber-smeared snapshot found in the brittle black pages of an old album, had become more dusty and indistinct as time for me unspooled with negligent haste into my own middle age, yet that summer's agony still cried out for explanation."
Etymology
From un- + spool.