Other forms: unhooked, unhooking, unhooks
To unhook something is to take it off a hook. A coat, a gate latch, a fish from a line.
The word is exactly what its parts suggest, and it belongs to the useful family of un- verbs that undo a physical action, alongside untie, unbutton, unzip and unlock. It takes from. Fishing uses it constantly. There is a slightly awkward figurative use meaning to disconnect something from a system, though disconnect is the plainer word for that. The opposite is simply to hook something up.
1verbunhookTo detach something from a hook.
“She unhooked her coat and put it on.”
Proto-Indo-European
*kog-
Proto-Germanic
*hōkaz
Proto-West Germanic
*hōk
Old English
hōc — angle, point, hook
Middle English
hoke
English
hook
English, today
unhook
Built from
From un- + hook. hook comes from Middle English hoke, from Old English hōc (“angle, point, hook”), from Proto-West Germanic hōk, from Proto-Germanic hōkaz, variant of hakô (“hook”), probably ultimately from Proto-Indo-European kog-, keg-, keng- (“peg, hook, claw”). 2 Cognate with Scots huke, huik (“hook”), West Frisian - and Dutch hoek (“hook, angle, corner”), Low German Hook, Huuk, German Hook (“small cluster of farms”), Faroese høkja (“crutch”), Icelandic hækja (“crutch”), nrn hek (“crutch”), Finnish kuokka (“hoe, mattock”). Related to hake.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA