explicate
adjEtymology Borrowed from Latin explicāre (“unfold, explain”).
1
Obsolete Evolved; unfolded.
explicate
verbUK /ˈɛk.splɪˌkeɪt/ · /ˈɛk.spləˌkeɪt/
Etymology Borrowed from Latin explicāre (“unfold, explain”).
1
To explain meticulously or in great detail.
- My homework is to explicate a poem.
- It is an act of grace and higheſt honour that we duſt and aſhes are admitted to ſpeak to the Eternal God, to run to him as to a Father, to lay open our wants, to complain of our burdens, to explicate our ſcruples, to beg remedy & eaſe, ſupport and counſel, health and ſafety, deliverance & ſalvation: […]1651, Jer[emy] Taylor, “Of Christian Religion”, in The Rule and Exercises of Holy Living. […], 2nd edition, London: […] Francis Ashe […], →OCLC, section VII (Of Prayer), page 284:
3 more examples
- Alternatively, there is the possibility of an extended narration composed of events that are not (wholly) explicated but are, nevertheless, possible and may even have taken place.1969, Susan Sontag, “Persona”, in Styles of Radical Will, Penguin Modern Classics, published 2009, →ISBN:
- Isou himself, enemy of all conventional discourse, wrote hundreds, then thousands of pages explicating his theories; […]1989, Greil Marcus, “The Crash of Yesterday's Art”, in Lipstick Traces, Faber & Faber, published 2009:
- In laying out these archetypes, Mr. Booker […] does a nimble job of collating dozens of stories, using the 34 years he says it took him to write this volume to identify and explicate all sorts of parallels and analogies that might not occur to the casual reader.2005 April 15, Michiko Kakutani, “The Plot Thins, or Are No Stories New?”, in The New York Times, →ISSN:
- Derived terms
- explicatable, explicature, misexplicate, reexplicate, unexplicated
- Related terms
- complicate, explication, explicative, explicator, explicit, overelaborate