unbuild

If you dally as the clock approaches 2 p.m. on Sunday, you will see that Jerson Osorio’s team can unbuild a city as fast as they can build one.

From Slate ● Dec. 22, 2024

Over the next several weeks, her relatives unbuild Ypi’s entire sense of reality: Her country was a prison, her education was indoctrination, the old versions of freedom and democracy were lies.

From Washington Post ● Jan. 21, 2022

And though stigmergy might explain how termites build, it does not readily explain why they so often unbuild, dismantling and modifying their work as they go.

From The New Yorker ● Sep. 10, 2018

There is something striking about hearing Deulofeu talking about the future and stability, although the risk when you build a talented team is that others come and unbuild it.

From The Guardian ● Oct. 16, 2015

Destroy, de-stroy′, v.i. to unbuild or pull down: to overturn: to ruin: to put an end to:—pr.p. destroy′ing:—pa.p. destroyed′.—n.

From Chambers's Twentieth Century Dictionary (part 1 of 4: A-D) by Various

And that would mean unbuilding the Great Wall.

From Washington Post ● Jan. 20, 2022

Indeed, the termite mound is not so much a building as a body, a self-regulating organic process that continuously reacts to its changing environment, building and unbuilding itself.

From The New Yorker ● Sep. 10, 2018

And the dreams that have gotten away have tended to be unfulfilled exercises in unbuilding and regreening.

From Seattle Times ● Jun. 7, 2018

To minimize the potential for contamination, workers have had to reverse engineer HA-23S, essentially unbuilding it from the inside using the glove ports.

From BusinessWeek ● Aug. 1, 2013

Every thought, every emotion, every action, works for the building or the unbuilding of character, and this synthesis of living must be reestablished before we can hope for social regeneration.

From Towards the Great Peace by Ralph Adams Cram

In 2025, London had 281,000 unbuilt homes—houses that were conditionally accepted but never built, often because the developer decided the conditions were too arduous.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 20, 2026

The proposed moratorium would not have stopped the giant World Logistics Center, which was approved by the City Council in 2015 and remains largely unbuilt.

From Los Angeles Times ● Feb. 5, 2026

Belfast's Casement Park and Everton's Bramley-Moore Dock, the former unbuilt while the latter is still under construction, were also included in the bid.

From BBC ● Oct. 10, 2023

Hobbs added that there are 80,000 unbuilt homes that will be able to move forward because they already have assured water supply certificates within the Phoenix Active Management Area, a designation used for regulating groundwater.

From Seattle Times ● Jun. 1, 2023

Because of the aid that we had furnished, our fence was still unbuilt.

From Two Wyoming Girls and Their Homestead Claim A Story for Girls by Carrie L. Marshall