Definitions

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • adjective Not official or not (yet) uniformed
  • verb Simple past tense and past participle of unfrock.

Etymologies

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Examples

  • Again the same pattern: repeated petitions from the local diocese to have the criminal "unfrocked" (an odd term when you think about it) met with stony indifference from Ratzinger's tightly run bureaucracy.

    Slate Magazine Christopher Hitchens 2010

  • I remembered my intellectuals and idealists, my unfrocked preachers, broken professors, and clean-minded, class-conscious workingmen.

    What Life Means to Me 2010

  • Here I found keen-flashing intellects and brilliant wits; for here I met strong and alert-brained, withal horny - handed, members of the working-class; unfrocked preachers too wide in their Christianity for any congregation of Mammon-worshippers; professors broken on the wheel of university subservience to the ruling class and flung out because they were quick with knowledge which they strove to apply to the affairs of mankind.

    What Life Means to Me 2010

  • It is more a series of linked short stories than a novel, mainly telling the story of a year in the life of Gösta Berling, a somewhat dissolute unfrocked clergyman who is given a chance to redeem himself through the exercise of social and moral responsibility.

    May Books 28) Gösta Berling's Saga nwhyte 2008

  • Verity (etc) the erstwhile "admirer" of Israel, also unfrocked out of her own mouth.

    On Thursday, the Legg report will be published along with... 2009

  • Like Mr Gladstone he did all he could to catch fallen women, but his motives were misunderstood and he was unfrocked.

    A lion has eaten our Oaten 2006

  • Like Mr Gladstone he did all he could to catch fallen women, but his motives were misunderstood and he was unfrocked.

    The Rector of Stiffkey 2005

  • Like Mr Gladstone he did all he could to catch fallen women, but his motives were misunderstood and he was unfrocked.

    Archive 2005-08-01 2005

  • Considering the pattern of your blogging "on t'internet" we can only assume that should this hilarious Tory maven be unfrocked as a girl she is genetically not fit to hold a pencil or rattle a keyboard.

    Famous at Last 2007

  • Camus, bishop of Bellay, printed in the last century a large book against the monks, which an unfrocked monk abridged.

    A Philosophical Dictionary 2007

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  • "Meanwhile, I was studying his appearance. Quite apart from the scrubby, unfed, unshaven look that a newly captured man generally has, he was a disgusting specimen. But he did not look brutal or in any way frightening: merely neurotic and, in a low way, intellectual. His pale, shifty eyes were deformed by powerful spectacles. He could have been an unfrocked clergyman, an actor ruined by drink, or a spiritualist medium. I have seen very similar people in London common lodging houses, and also in the Reading Room of the British Museum."

    - George Orwell, 'Revenge is Sour', Tribune, 1945.

    February 20, 2009