unlicked envelope
- noun
:
sobre sin pegar
- He handed her the unlicked envelope, asking her to seal it and send it out.
Examples
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An unlicked envelope may indicate an unread or unsent letter.
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Please hand me that unlicked envelope.
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She found an unlicked envelope among the pile of mail on her desk.
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I found some unlicked envelopes in the drawer.
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He handed her the unlicked envelope, asking her to seal it and send it out.
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An unlicked envelope may indicate an unread or unsent letter.
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She found an unlicked envelope among the pile of mail on her desk.
How Sealed
Surface Forms
Morphology
unlicked + envelope
The phrase is fully compositional: the negative prefix 'un-' plus the past participle of 'lick' yields 'not licked', applied to 'envelope' gives 'an envelope that has not been licked/sealed'. Even though 'unlicked' is rare in dictionaries, a B1 learner who knows 'lick', the productive negation 'un-', and 'envelope' can derive the meaning because this is a literal and cross-linguistically common morphological pattern.
Etymology
Unlicked envelope The phrase unlicked envelope comes from when people closed letters by licking the flap. An unlicked envelope was not sealed, so it often showed the letter was 'unsent' or 'unread'.
