unbolted

unbolted

1. simple past tense and past participle of unbolt

unbolted (not comparable)

1. Not fastened with a bolt.
   • 1779, Samuel Johnson, Prefaces Biographical and Critical to the Works of the English Poets, London: C. Bathurst et al., Volume 2, “Milton,” p. 46,

     […] it seems not more reasonable to leave the right of printing unrestrained, because writers may afterwards be censured, than it would be to sleep with doors unbolted, because by our laws we can hang a thief.

2. Not sifted.

   unbolted flour

   • 1850, Frederick Douglass, “The Nature of Slavery” in My Bondage and My Freedom, New York and Auburn: Miller, Orton & Mulligan, 1855, p. 430,

     [The slave] toils that another may reap the fruit; he is industrious that another may live in idleness; he eats unbolted meal that another may eat the bread of fine flour; he labors in chains at home, under a burning sun and biting lash, that another may ride in ease and splendor abroad […]

3. (figuratively, obsolete) Coarse, uncultured, vulgar.
   • c. 1605,, William Shakespeare, King Lear, Act II, Scene 2,

     My lord, if you’ll give me leave, I will tread this unbolted villain into mortar and daub the walls of a jakes with him.