Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • intransitive verb To unwind and open (something rolled up).
  • intransitive verb To unfold and present to view; reveal.
  • intransitive verb To become unrolled.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • To open, as something rolled or folded: as, to unroll cloth.
  • To display; lay open. To strike off from a roll or register.
  • To become straight or loose, as in passing from a rolled condition.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • transitive verb To open, as what is rolled or convolved.
  • transitive verb To display; to reveal.
  • transitive verb To remove from a roll or register, as a name.

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

  • verb transitive To straighten something that has been rolled, twisted or curled.
  • verb intransitive To emerge, be revealed or become apparent; to unfold.
  • verb transitive (computing) To replace (a loop in a program) with a repetitive sequence of the individual instructions that the loop would carry out, sometimes used as an optimization.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • verb reverse the winding or twisting of
  • verb unroll, unfold, or spread out or be unrolled, unfolded, or spread out from a furled state

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From un- + roll.

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Examples

  • Alf, she's by all odds the finest bolt of calico I ever tried to unroll -- I say _unroll_, because if she hain't a tight mystery I never saw one. "

    Dixie Hart 1888

  • I remember her picking up The Man in Lower Ten while my hair got dry enough to unroll from a load of kid curlers trying to make me like my idol Mary Pickford.

    2008 May « Becca’s Byline 2008

  • I remember her picking up The Man in Lower Ten while my hair got dry enough to unroll from a load of kid curlers trying to make me like my idol Mary Pickford.

    Raised to Read 2008

  • It also demonstrated experimentally how an - In parallelization and vectorization, dependences restrict the par - other loop transformation, called unroll-and-jam

    Recently Uploaded Slideshows 2010

  • It also demonstrated experimentally how an - In parallelization and vectorization, dependences restrict the par - other loop transformation, called unroll-and-jam

    Recently Uploaded Slideshows 2010

  • Etymologically, the word evolution is linked to the word for "unroll," as in the way an ancient manuscript was unfurled.

    One Cʘsmos Gagdad Bob 2010

  • Seales hopes to scan two of the scrolls and then digitally "unroll" them on a computer screen so scholars can read them.

    WBKO - HomePage - Headlines 2009

  • "We said, 'Let's simplify this thing down to two steps -' pinch 'and' unroll '- that's it ...

    Muti 2010

  • He had waited too often and futilely in the past for porcupines to unroll, to waste any more time.

    The Lair 2010

  • Quaker-gray from taupe, until the blackwater satins unroll their gorgeous lengths above a sharpening partition of lake-and-loam.

    Varenna 2010

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