elaboration

from The Century Dictionary.

• noun The act of elaborating, or working out or producing; production or formation by a gradual process: as, the elaboration of sap by a tree.
• noun The act of working out and finishing with great care and exactness in detail; the act of improving or refining by successive processes; painstaking labor.
• noun Labored finish or completeness; detailed execution; careful work in all parts: as, the elaboration of the picture is wonderful.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

• noun The act or process of producing or refining with labor; improvement by successive operations; refinement.
• noun (Physiol.) The natural process of formation or assimilation, performed by the living organs in animals and vegetables, by which a crude substance is changed into something of a higher order

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

• noun The act or process of producing or refining with labor; improvement by successive operations; refinement.
• noun The natural process of formation or assimilation, performed by the living organs in animals and vegetables, by which a crude substance is changed into something of a higher order; as, the elaboration of food into chyme; the elaboration of chyle, or sap, or tissues.
• noun computing Setting up a hierarchy of calculated constants in a language such as Ada so that the values of one or more of them determine others further down in the hierarchy.
• noun electronics The process of taking a parsed tree of an abstract integrated circuit definition in a language such as Verilog and creating a hierarchy of module instances that ends with primitive (atomic) gates and statements.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

• noun the result of improving something
• noun a discussion that provides additional information
• noun developing in intricate and painstaking detail
• noun marked by elaborately complex detail
• noun addition of extra material or illustration or clarifying detail