allude

present singular third person alludes · participle present alluding · participle past alluded · past alluded

1. intransitiveTo refer to something indirectly or by suggestion; to invoke it by implication rather than mention.

   First, she alluded to her husband as "the man at home looking after the children". Then she referred to him as "my George".

   3 more examples

   These speeches . . . do seem to allude unto such ministerial garments as were then in use.

   1597, Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Book V, Chapter xxix.3, 1841 ed., page 523

   It was aptly said by Newton that "whatever is not deduced from facts must be regarded as hypothesis," but hypothesis appears to us a title too honourable for the crude guessings to which we allude.

   1846, George Luxford, Edward Newman, The Phytologist: a popular botanical miscellany: Volume 2, Part 2, page 474

   We live our lives in three dimensions for our threescore and ten allotted years. Yet every branch of contemporary science, from statistics to cosmology, alludes to processes that operate on scales outside of human experience: the millisecond and the nanometer, the eon and the light-year.

   2012 January 28, Robert L. Dorit, “Rereading Darwin”, in American Scientist, volume 100, number 1, archived from the original on 14 Nov 2012, page 23

   Synonyms: advert, hint, imply, indicate, inkle, insinuate, intimate, moot