Disentombed

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. Taken out from a tomb, grave, or burial place, usually when exhuming a corpse or remains
2. Extracted or uncovered from an entombment, often to relocate or study the body or objects buried
3. Lifted from a burial site or tomb, typically as part of an archaeological or forensic process

Etymology: "Disentombed" is the past tense and past participle of "disentomb," which means to remove something from a tomb or grave. The verb is built from two English parts: the prefix "dis-," meaning "reversing" or "undoing," and "entomb," meaning to place in a tomb. Put together, the word literally means undoing an entombment. The prefix "dis-" has a long pedigree. It descends from a Proto-Indo-European root for "two" or "apart," passed through Proto-Italic and Latin, where it carried the sense of separation or reversal, and arrived in English by way of Old French and Middle English. "Entomb" is itself a compound of "en-" (to put into) and "tomb," so "disentomb" reverses a process that was already a combination of older parts.

Synonyms: exhumed, unearthed, released