different between withdraw vs untell

English

Etymology

From Middle English withdrawen (“to draw away, draw back”), from with- (“away, back”) + drawen (“to draw”). More at with-, draw.

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /w?ð?d???/, /w???d???/
• Rhymes: -??

Verb

withdraw (third-person singular simple present withdraws, present participle withdrawing, simple past withdrew, past participle withdrawn)

1. (transitive) To pull (something) back, aside, or away.
   • 1594, Richard Hooker, Of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie

     Impossible it is that God should withdraw his presence from anything.

2. (intransitive) To stop talking to, or interacting with, other people and start thinking thoughts that are not related to what is happening around.
3. (transitive) To take back (a comment, etc); retract.

   to withdraw false charges

4. (transitive) To remove, to stop providing (one's support, etc); to take out of service.
5. (transitive) To extract (money from an account).
6. (intransitive) To retreat.
7. (intransitive) To be in withdrawal from an addictive drug etc. [from 20th c.]
   • 1994, Edward St Aubyn, Bad News, Picador 2006, p. 201:

     Simon had tried to rob a bank while he was withdrawing, but he had been forced to surrender to the police after they had fired several volleys at him.

Synonyms

• (take back): recant, unsay; See also Thesaurus:recant

Translations

References

• “withdraw”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–present.

English

Etymology

un- +? tell

Verb

untell (third-person singular simple present untells, present participle untelling, simple past and past participle untold)

1. (transitive) To withdraw or retract (something told); never to have told.
   • 1993, Jack Selzer, Understanding scientific prose (page 54)

     Narrative untells itself by multiplying itself into discontinuous "turns" that cannot be resolved into a continuous story.

   • 1998, Diane DuBose Brunner, Between the masks: resisting the politics of essentialism (page 29)

     Trinh (1991) writes that untelling the stories of privilege and marginality is a form of displacement that takes a long time.

   • 2004, Patrick Bizzaro, More lights than one: on the fiction of Fred Chappell (page 103)

     And once his story was told, it was told; there was no way to untell it, no way to make himself look good.

2. (transitive, archaic) To undo or reverse the counting of; to count back.
   • 1607, Thomas Heywood, A Woman Killed with Kindness

     That Time could turn up his swift sandy glass, / To untell the days, and to redeem these hours.