unsort

English

Etymology

un- + sort, apparently by confusion of unravel, untangle or similar and sort.

Verb

unsort (third-person singular simple present unsorts, present participle unsorting, simple past and past participle unsorted)

  1. (transitive, nonstandard) To sort out; to resolve.
    • 2003, Edwin S. Gaustad, ‎Mark A. Noll, A Documentary History of Religion in America to 1877 (page 54)
      In his letter to Virginia's governor excerpted below, Rolfe tries to unsort the mixture of motives that led to his decision to marry Pocahantas.
    • 2008, Susan McGeown, Call Me Elle (page 48)
      I try to unsort this big tangle of things that all of a sudden I've tripped over.
  2. (computing) To shuffle a data structure so that it is no longer sorted.
    • 1999, Jesus Castagnetto, Professional PHP Programming, page 162:
      And what if we want to unsort an array? The shuffle ( ) function uses PHP's random number generator to re-arrange the elements of an array randomly.

Anagrams

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