Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- transitive verb To make clear the meaning of; explain. synonym: explain.
from The Century Dictionary.
- To unfold; expand; open.
- To unfold the meaning or sense of; explain; interpret.
- To give an explanation.
- Unfolded; explicated.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- adjective Evolved; unfolded.
- transitive verb obsolete To unfold; to expand; to lay open.
- transitive verb To unfold the meaning or sense of; to explain; to clear of difficulties or obscurity; to interpret.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- verb transitive To
explain meticulously or in greatdetail ; toelucidate ; toanalyze .
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- verb make plain and comprehensible
- verb elaborate, as of theories and hypotheses
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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Could you contact orthoneurologists if that's even a word and explicate the two star quarterbacks' respective injuries?
NYT > Home Page By THE NEW YORK TIMES 2012
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I share your impatience with topical books or books that don't try to do anything but explicate a theme, but I don't see why saying something is incompatible with literary performance.
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He saw the manifest aspect of the universe in space and time as part of an explicate order, and that underlying the substrate of matter is an implicate order, which is generative and holographic.
James O'Dea: Finding the Holy of Holies: Sticky Particles and the Ground of All Being James O'Dea 2010
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He saw the manifest aspect of the universe in space and time as part of an explicate order, and that underlying the substrate of matter is an implicate order, which is generative and holographic.
James O'Dea: Finding the Holy of Holies: Sticky Particles and the Ground of All Being James O 2010
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He saw the manifest aspect of the universe in space and time as part of an explicate order, and that underlying the substrate of matter is an implicate order, which is generative and holographic.
James O'Dea: Finding the Holy of Holies: Sticky Particles and the Ground of All Being James O 2010
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Further, both the looser, more informal structure and the reader-friendly critical language Thirlwell employs seem to me to work to accomplish one of criticism's legitimate tasks, which is to explicate features of literary works that are not necessarily obvious to all readers, that require the critic to call attention to them as evocatively as possible.
Translated Texts 2010
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The real difference is that Auerbach is attempting to explicate the text in front of him, to help the reader "see" more fully what is really going on in the scene from the Odyssey.
Literary Study 2009
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I myself generally adopt the latter strategy when attempting a review of an unconventional work, although I don't so much try to make the work fit the existing categories as to explicate what it seems to me to be doing that effectively replaces or substitutues for those categories.
Experimental Fiction 2010
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Such critics might have been able to explicate the novel more rigorously and with a more informed perspective on its historical, national-literary, and biographical contexts.
Book Reviewing 2010
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Years ago I had the opportunity to visit the santeria shrine at Barracoa in Cuba with a practitioner who was ready to explicate the beliefs behind African religion.
oroboros commented on the word explicate
See implicate for usage note.
August 4, 2008
kingparton commented on the word explicate
We can never wholly explicate a poem any more than we can explicate ourselves, or another person—but we can try to come close.
Donald Hall, "To Read Poetry"
July 27, 2011