# demask
## English
### Etymology

From de- +‎ mask.

### Verb

demask (third-person singular simple present demasks, present participle demasking, simple past and past participle demasked)
* (transitive) To clear etchant and maskant from a part being chemically etched or milled.
** 1958, John I. Thompson and Company, ARDC Production Design Handbook, pages 20-2:The part is etched at a predetermined rate, then rinsed, demasked, and a final rinse is given.
** 1976, William T. Harris, Chemical Milling: The Technology of Cutting Materials by Etching, page 37:If, however, a large area is pin-holed the part should be demasked and re-coated after remedial action has been taken on the maskant or the application plant.
** 1979, Ernest Paul DeGarmo, Materials and Processes in Manufacturing, page 701:Strip or demask, clean and desmut as necessary.
* (more generally) To remove any masking materials that have been added to protect an area.
** 1986, Donatas Satas, Plastics Finishing and Decoration, page 144:The first sequence is to mask, paint, bake, then demask; the second sequence is to mask, paint, demask, then bake.
** 2006, Barry R. Schneider, Jim A. Davis, Avoiding the Abyss: Progress, Shortfalls, and the Way Ahead in Combating the WMD Threat, page 219:Tools specifically designed to assist in determining when it is safe to demask inside facilities that had chemical and/or biological contamination drawn in through the heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems should be created.
** 2017, He Tang, Automotive Vehicle Assembly Processes and Operations Management:Such protection masks shall be removed (demasked) after sealing and coating.
* To reveal something that was masked or hidden; to expose; to unmask.
** 1946, Journal of Immunology, page 134:When it was learned that the antigen is heatstable , attempts were made to "demask" it in the fresh mucosa by boiling.
** 1956, United States. Congress. House. Committee on Un-American Activities, Soviet Total War: "historic Mission" of Violence and Deceit, page 568:Its only purpose is to encourage individuals to "demask" all those, persons or institutions, who lag behind in the "battle of production," or those who do not fully adhere to the current party line, or, in general, to denounce all mistakes, deficiencies and shortcomings in the "building of communism."
** 1996, John Denvir, Legal Reelism: Movies as Legal Texts, page 79:An end, but perhaps not the end— at least not if we are willing to demask the frame-up used to demask the frame-up.
** 2004, Pradyot Patnaik, Dean's Analytical Chemistry Handbook, pages 2-15:For example, boric acid is used to demask fluoride complexes of tin (IV) and molybdenum (VI) .
** 2014, Armin Biere, Roderick Bloem, Computer Aided Verification, page 119:As we have shown earlier, for a linear function f(z), we can mask the input z with an XOR of a random bit r before the computation and demask with an XOR of f(r) afterward.
* (more specifically) To overcome ideological preconceptions and labels.
** 1980, Revue internationale de philosophie - Issues 131-134, page 219:Marxists have always attempted to demask earlier legitimations of power as ideology by interpreting them as expressions of class interest.
** 2007, Cameron McCarthy, Globalizing Cultural Studies, page 71:It can assist us in the type of iterative questioning that is needed to demask the politics of research by unsettling simplistic oppositions.
** 2009, Susan Neiman, Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists, page 325:What you have suffered is easier to know than what you've done, and harder to demask. It takes a brutally honest victim to demask the victim's status itself.
** 2023, Willem De Haan, The Politics of Redress: Crime, Punishment and Penal Abolition:The objective of a critical criminology is critically to investigate the facts of criminalization and imprisonment, to demask the 'moral and ideological veneer' of an unequal society, and to enliven critical debates about modes of social change towards 'post-capitalist alternatives' (ibid).
* To make salient or conspicuous; to draw attention to or improve the perception of.
** 1968, Gerard Radnitzky · · Snippet view, Contemporary Schools of Metascience, page 114:They wished to demask hidden metaphysics, to demask the false pretenses of sentences purportively descriptive but de facto metaphysical or evaluative.
** 2016, Talis Bachmann, Perception of Pixelated Images, page 51:When it it that one may need to demask information inherent in a pixelated image?
** 2022, William R. Uttal, The Uttal Tetralogy of Cognitive Neuroscience, page 159:Although there are many complications of shape, contrast, and distance, the general effect of the flashed letter is to "demask" a solitary letter or a letter of a word that had been rendered less visible, presumably by the surrounding letters, when it was a part of the word.

#### Usage notes

Authors who use demask to refer to the overcoming of ideological preconceptions often make a distinction between this term and the term unmask, which they use to indicate the revelation of something "other", which could not be seen before the act of unmasking.

#### Derived terms

* demasker

### Anagrams

* masked