unpack

verb

Etymology: From Middle English unpakken, equivalent to un- + pack. Compare Saterland Frisian uutpakje (“to unpack”), West Frisian útpakke (“to unpack”), Dutch uitpakken (“to unpack”), German auspacken (“to unpack”).

1. To remove from a package or container, particularly with respect to items that had previously been arranged closely and securely in a pack.

   “They didn't have time to unpack their bags before going out to dinner.”

2. To empty containers that had been packed.

   “They didn't have time to unpack before going to dinner.”

3. To analyze a concept or a text; to explain.

   “There may be another argument here, if we had time to unpack it, about modernism and the rise of the middle classes.”

   “Yet few Americans — including the president — understand how global trade works, both how it can help our economy and how some can be left behind. Let’s try to unpack a few of the complexities.”

4. To undergo separation of its features into distinct segments.

   “The rounded vowels [y] and [œ/ə] in Russian seem to unpack as glide-vowel sequences in words borrowed from French and German, […]”

   “Whereas the high vowels /ʏ, y/ unpack, the mid vowels /œ, ø/ are adapted as single segments in these languages (see examples in (36) for Vietnamese (Barker 1969) and (37) for Fon (Gbeto 2000)). […] French /y/ → Vietnamese /wi/ accu [a'ky] → ac-quy [ak kwi]”

5. To decompress (data).

   “Packages […] are often archived and compressed using the zip utility; you can unpack these with the unzip command[…]”