as in to liberate
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Recent Examples of unshackle
The jury was filing out of the courtroom on Sept. 23 when Routh, unshackled, grabbed a pen from a desk and thrust it toward himself.
—
Kinsey Crowley, USA Today, 4 Feb. 2026
On Friday Mangione arrived at court unshackled in his tan prison garb.
—Lorena O’Neil, Rolling Stone, 30 Jan. 2026
Where Ann Lee sought to dance herself clean from the Church of England (and its oppressive insistence that suffering is the surest path to heaven), Fastvold was and remains similarly determined to unshackle herself from the gospel truths of modern film production.
—David Ehrlich, IndieWire, 1 Dec. 2025
His orations of statistics, stories, and argumentative persuasion at colleges were energetic, frictious, and necessary to unshackle us from grievance and tribalism.
—Alex Rosado, MSNBC Newsweek, 11 Sep. 2025
See All Example Sentences for unshackle
Kinsey Crowley, USA Today, 4 Feb. 2026
On Friday Mangione arrived at court unshackled in his tan prison garb.
—Lorena O’Neil, Rolling Stone, 30 Jan. 2026
Where Ann Lee sought to dance herself clean from the Church of England (and its oppressive insistence that suffering is the surest path to heaven), Fastvold was and remains similarly determined to unshackle herself from the gospel truths of modern film production.
—David Ehrlich, IndieWire, 1 Dec. 2025
His orations of statistics, stories, and argumentative persuasion at colleges were energetic, frictious, and necessary to unshackle us from grievance and tribalism.
—Alex Rosado, MSNBC Newsweek, 11 Sep. 2025
See All Example Sentences for unshackle
Recent Examples of Synonyms for unshackle
Verb
-
On the one hand, the newfound freedom is liberating.—
Ashlee Gadd,
PEOPLE,
10 May 2026
-
Michelle has felt particularly liberated in speaking her mind.—
Peter Slevin,
New Yorker,
4 May 2026
Verb
-
Once the Southern Crescent pulled into the station, all trains bound north were emancipated from Jim Crow laws.—
Literary Hub,
Literary Hub,
11 May 2026
-
After mutual suspicion, the two arrived at a reluctant truce in which Paul was free to bring non-Jews into the Jesus movement, emancipating them from Jewish ritual, while the original Jerusalem circle continued to keep kosher, circumcise, and all the rest.—
Adam Gopnik,
New Yorker,
13 Apr. 2026
Verb
-
The nationwide standalone 5G that the carrier announced Wednesday essentially unchains that service from 4G LTE, allowing devices to connect to the network without first requiring a setup via AT&T’s older and slower network.—
PC Magazine,
PC Magazine,
9 Oct. 2025
-
When Henson refused to unchain herself from the fence, California Highway Patrol arrested her.—
Kate Talerico,
The Mercury News,
7 Aug. 2024
Verb
-
His long run in office, however, delivered only partial victories on his two primary ambitions: to unfetter Japan’s military after decades of postwar pacifism and to jump-start and overhaul its economy through a program known as Abenomics.—
New York Times,
New York Times,
8 July 2022
-
As spring ends, maple trees begin to unfetter winged seeds that flutter and swirl from branches to land gently on the ground.—
Nikk Ogasa,
Scientific American,
22 Sep. 2021
Verb
-
The passage of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, which enfranchised formerly enslaved men, seemingly brought the push for voting rights to fruition.—
Time,
Time,
12 Sep. 2025
-
Open primaries would enfranchise more than a million New York voters, who are disproportionately young and represent communities of color.—
John Avlon,
New York Daily News,
7 July 2025
Verb
-
This work unbinds the body from centuries of Western imagery, freeing it from representation and opening it to abstraction.—
Mame-Diarra Niang,
Artforum,
2 Nov. 2025
-
But for Buddhists, dying is an opportunity to unbind from the past and start again.—
Amanda Whiting,
Vulture,
16 Mar. 2025
Verb
-
The film should be highly disturbing, but the dramatic tension never gels, despite composer Christopher Stacey’s efforts to unmoor us by injecting discordant strings beneath mundane scenes.—
Peter Debruge,
Variety,
18 Feb. 2023
-
To accommodate Campos’s cavalry, P.S.G. has had to unmoor Leandro Paredes, Ander Herrera, Georginio Wijnaldum, Idrissa Gueye, Julian Draxler, Ángel Di Maria and Xavi Simons this summer, too.—
Rory Smith,
New York Times,
2 Sep. 2022
Verb
-
With the help of the wise and mysterious maid Willie May (Latifah) and a stubborn new girl in school played by Mills, the boy must decide whether to set the tiger free and in turn uncage his emotional grief.—
Etan Vlessing,
The Hollywood Reporter,
30 Aug. 2019
Cite this Entry
“Unshackle.” Merriam-Webster.com Thesaurus, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/unshackle. Accessed 19 May. 2026.
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