unfather

plural unfathers

1. A man who is not a father.

   Instead of three fathers rooting for me when I made my processional entrance into the football stadium and onto an immense green field to collect my empty diploma case, there was Rudy, an unfather, somewhere in a blurry sea of cardinal red

   2014, Brando Skyhorse, Take This Man: A Memoir, page 197

   2 more examples

   But this delugic force is not truly akin to those unfathers until Wordsworth recovers from total loss and, in a moment of specular identification, recognizes in that errant power the face of his own soul: "And now recovering, to my Soul I say/'I recognise thy glory'"

   1994, David Collings, Wordsworthian errancies: the poetics of cultural dismemberment

   With the increasing numbers of unfathers and unmothers, churches need ceremonies that aid acceptance, thank medical professionals for valiant attempts, promote courage to face a childless future and remind them of the omnipresence of the Therapeutic Presence.

   1997, Humane Health Care International - Volume 13, page 31

present singular third person unfathers · participle present unfathering · participle past unfathered · past unfathered

1. To cause someone to become less of a father.

   More strongly still: "Visitation unfathers men. This phenomenon gradually strangles the father-child relationship."

   2000, Gilbert Meilaender, Things that Count: Essays Moral and Theological, page 234

   1 more example

   A son no son, unfathers me. Earth, sky and deep, rise, come, be father for me: ascend before him into the day, to cover him from all his light, and your annihilation fall on him!

   1978, Plays and Players - Issue 1; Issue 26, page 46

2. To cause someone to be fatherless.

   Wendell's mother unfathers him twice-over (through dislike of her first husband) by giving him her maiden name and claiming his conception was immaculate (R, 20, 46-47).

   1991, Mary Lynn Broe, Silence and Power: A Reevaluation of Djuna Barnes, page 88

   2 more examples

   Some of these feelings, in all their confusion, press into the flamboyant statement with which he unfathers Cordelia at 1.1.116: The barbarous Scythian Or he that makes his generation messes To gorge his appetite, shall to my bosom Be as well neighbour'd, pitied, and relieved, As thou my sometime daughter.

   1979, “CR. The Centennial Review - Volume 23”, in (Please provide the book title or journal name), number 358

   Yet how is the unfathering related to usurpation? Is the situation as Oedipal as its rhetoric suggests? Oedipus encounters and kills a traveler on the road outside Thebes, and by doing so unfathers himself.

   1988, J. Douglas Kneale, Monumental writing: aspects of rhetoric in Wordsworth's poetry