(v. t.) To withdraw or repudiate formally and publicly (opinions formerly expressed); to contradict, as a former declaration; to take back openly; to retract; to recall.
(v. i.) To revoke a declaration or proposition; to unsay what has been said; to retract; as, convince me that I am wrong, and I will recant.
Example Sentences:
(1) The prime minister made an unscheduled statement on Tuesday morning from behind a lectern outside 10 Downing Street, in which she recanted her repeated promise not to go to the polls before 2020.
(2) The hordes poured in to defend her, the story went global and by lunchtime on Friday the leader of the council was having to recant and apologise, live on BBC Radio 4.
(3) My article for the Forest Journal, robustly supporting the chancellor’s earlier policy, is already with the printer … Having been persuaded of the correctness of the course that the chancellor is now following, I merely needed an opportunity to recant.” Philip Hammond’s letter Ann-Marie Trevelyan, a backbench MP who had raised concerns about the NICs rise, told the Guardian she welcomed the chancellor’s change of heart: “My leaflets had ‘no tax rises’ on them.
(4) One explicitly said he sought no recantation of past remarks nor a change of position on Israel, just reassurance that "you won't put us through another four years of this".
(5) The experience with zomepirac (Zomax) and the unexpected incidence of severe anaphylactic reactions is recanted as an unfortunate illustrated example that has served to upgrade the adverse reaction reporting process.
(6) Though Berger never specifically recanted, he did later admit that Ways of Seeing was too rushed and crude, and that he had not allowed for the genius factor.
(7) Referring to the two hadith in which Muhammad reportedly condemns apostasy as a capital offence, Maher Hathout , author of In Pursuit of Justice: The Jurisprudence of Human Rights in Islam writes: "both of them contradict the Qur'an and other instances in which the Prophet did not compel anyone to embrace Islam, nor punish them if they recanted."
(8) Anders also said that on 2 May Sterling met Stiviano at the Four Seasons hotel in Beverly Hills – just before she recorded an interview with ABC's Barbara Walters – and asked her to recant statements about the tape's authenticity and confess to doctoring it.
(9) Mal Brough has categorically denied asking Peter Slipper’s former staffer to procure copies of the Speaker’s diary for him, recanting an admission he apparently made during a 60 Minutes interview last year.
(10) Instead, Flint professed her loyalty, only to recant 18 hours later, while Hutton insisted his departure was personal and that he wanted Brown to stay in post.
(11) As a former prosecutor herself, Gold said it is tough to bring charges when a witness recants, even though it is possible to bring a case to trial when there is no witness prepared to testify.
(12) He later recanted the position on reducing Asian immigration.
(13) There were no breast-beating recantations but, according to Dawidoff, "he still [had] reservations about how far afield he took country music from the relatively unadorned prewar downhome sound."
(14) In an interview on the 7.30 program, the independent senator Andrew Wilkie said Garrett’s recanting of the story “beggars belief”.
(15) Instead of defending her position, Penny caved, recanted, and commented mournfully that "having your privilege checked" was painful.
(16) • Five doctors were coerced by the Sri Lankan government to recant on casualty figures they gave to journalists in the last months of island's brutal civil war.
(17) William Sweeney, the FBI’s assistant director in New York, said on Monday that the FBI had got a report of a domestic incident involving Rahami some time ago, but the allegations had been recanted, and “there’s nothing to indicate that currently he was on our radar”.
(18) The change in the tide was obvious when arch-Blairite Peter Mandelson went on television to recant.
(19) It would recant the illiberal legacy of Labour home secretaries, of Charles Clarke , Jack Straw and Jacqui Smith , and reassert individual rights against the surveillance state.
(20) Nick Herbert, the Tory MP who chaired his party’s remain campaign, wrote in the Guardian that anyone warning against hard Brexit was branded as “heretics who must recant and swear adherence to the new faith”.
Unsay
Definition:
(v. t.) To recant or recall, as what has been said; to refract; to take back again; to make as if not said.
Example Sentences:
(1) Privatisation would destroy that at a stroke.” Trevor Phillips says the unsayable about race and multiculturalism Read more The government is considering privatisation as one of a number of options for Channel 4, which is commercially run but owned by the state.
(2) And the oath of “believing in freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from abuse …” would arguably entail, from the prime minister, her cabinet, her party and her Ukip fellow travellers, a rather more rigorous rejection of Islamophobia, so that Muslim women in shopping centres didn’t have to be dragged along the ground by their hijabs in a newly emboldened climate of “saying the unsayable”.
(3) Comedy wants you to say the unsayable; the celebrity industry would rather you didn’t.
(4) Where it was possible at last for Egyptians to stand side by side and say what was previously unsayable.
(5) That No comes from deep within – and he can never unsay it.
(6) Lessing delivers the occasional blast of dry humour, but it is her intellectual honesty, her ability to say the unsayable, which has made her famous.
(7) "Germans would probably do themselves a service by leaving the euro, but this is something that is unsayable in German politics."
(8) Many of these are people with posh names, liberal-baiting sayers of the unsayable – the “unsayable” generally just being routine racism, sexism and idiocy.
(9) For a potential £400,000 he was prepared to say the unsayable.
(10) It can be an interesting exercise to think the otherwise unsayable.
(11) The unsayable always has that strange cliff-edge allure, and quite a few comedians forage their material in no-go areas.
(12) "I like working in an environment of creative confidence and respect – where nothing is unsayable, so long as you find the right way to say it."
(13) One council leader I met dared openly to say the unsayable – there was no initiative on benefit nor incentive to work that could break the cycle of welfare dependency because there was no local worthwhile work.
(14) Mindful of the damage his win-at-all-costs moves had wrought, Netanyahu lost no time trying to unsay what he had said.
(15) His unsayable thing about women is that they [we] all want to be ravished.
(16) There are things you can never unsay, that you cannot say and still remain friends, and that would have been one of them.
(17) Here was a writer who said the unsayable, thought the unthinkable, and fearlessly put it down there, in all its raw emotional and intellectual chaos.
(18) Joan provoked incredulity mixed with a weird kind of rapture, as she said the unsayable – and they doubled over in laughter again and again.
(19) As Ken Clarke did in 1990 when his colleagues ummed and ahed and allowed themselves to be browbeaten by Margaret Thatcher and her praetorian guard, so Purnell has said the previously unsayable - that the prime minister must go.
(20) I was cited everywhere as having said the unsayable: that it is possible for a woman to dislike her children, even to regret having brought them into the world.