unsettle
/ʌnˈsɛt(ə)l
/verb [with object]
Cause to feel anxious or uneasy; disturb: the crisis has unsettled financial markets an unsettling conversation...
- But going more than halfway to tolerate what look like disturbing cultural practices unsettles some historians, aid experts, economists and others with experience in developing societies.
- I have also so far not spoken to the children on the phone as my husband reassures me that they are fine and a possible phone conversation may unsettle them.
- Even overhearing conversations was enough to unsettle me.
Synonyms
discompose, unnerve, upset, disturb, disquiet, make anxious, make uneasy, perturb, discomfit, disconcert, alarm, confuse, nonplus, bewilder, confound, perplex;
daunt, dismay, trouble, bother, agitate, fluster, ruffle, jolt, shake (up), throw, put off, take aback, unbalance, destabilize, throw off balance, put someone off their stroke, pull the rug (out) from under
informal rattle, faze, psych out
Derivatives
unsettlement
- A council spokesman added: ‘There are many areas of the town where the parking and traffic problem is a major source of tension and unsettlement.’
- But that unsettlement is unconscious - you naturally don't like the idea of a killer on the loose, and though it's tangential and seemingly unrelated, the concepts are stuck in the back of your mind.
- Moreover, the coining of the term ‘information society’ seems to give some intellectual order to the confusion and unsettlement caused by what appears as an unusually rapid period of change.
unsettlingly
- I would be eerily, even unsettlingly, quiet and orderly.
- La Candelaria is full of beautiful Spanish colonial houses in glorious colours with ornate iron balconies, great lavish wooden doors and rather unsettlingly life-like copper statues.
- Carol's accusations are paranoid, exaggerated and ruinously unfair; but the play's genius is that her analysis of the smug patriarchy that frustrates her is unsettlingly acute.