unhappen
Word of the day 12 October 2026
intransitive verb — unhappens, unhappening, unhappened found in the wild
un·HAP·pen
Of an event: to stop having taken place, as if it had never occurred.
It happened, and then it unhappened.
Etymologyun- + happen. A reversative un- (as in untie, undo) on a verb that should not take one. You can untie a knot because the knot is still there to work on; an event is over, so there is nothing left to reach back into. The prefix asks for something the verb cannot give, and that is the whole charge of the word.
NoteNot a new word. It is in print from 1711 and has its own Wiktionary entry, so it sits here with the old words. It is here because it names a wish English otherwise has to spell out at length: not that something be fixed, forgiven or forgotten, but that it stop having happened. The poster pushes it further: Timeline Shift, Extra Life, Higher-dimensional Technology. In the dictionary sense, unhappening is figurative, “as if it were undone.” In the poster's sense it is literal: the event is removed from the timeline, a whole heart restored where the broken one was, as if by a video game's extra life. That is the frontier the word points at. Forgiveness works on the consequences of an event; unhappening would work on the event itself. Unintercommingle, earlier in this lexicon, is the procedural version of the same wish: not to amend the result, but to go back to before the items were fused.
Prior use of the form
Where this string was already doing work before it was put to this use. The sense below is the coinage; the spelling is not.
“For an event to stop having taken place, as if it were undone.” With its own entries for unhappened and unhappening (the latter also as a rare noun: a nonevent).
unhappen, unhappened and unhappening all in print for three centuries, with steady use through 2019.