explain

present singular third person explains · participle present explaining · participle past explained · past explained · alternative obsolete explane

1. transitiveTo make plain, manifest, or intelligible; to clear of obscurity; to illustrate the meaning of.

   The issue was explained to the governor in detail.

   3 more examples

   The boy became volubly friendly and bubbling over with unexpected humour and high spirits. He tried to persuade Cicely to stay away from the ball-room for a fourth dance. Nobody would miss them, he explained.

   1909 September 9, Archibald Marshall [pseudonym; Arthur Hammond Marshall], “A Court Ball”, in The Squire’s Daughter, London: Methuen & Co. […], →OCLC, page 9

   Drawings and pictures are more than mere ornaments in scientific discourse. Blackboard sketches, geological maps, diagrams of molecular structure, astronomical photographs, MRI images, the many varieties of statistical charts and graphs: These pictorial devices are indispensable tools for presenting evidence, for explaining a theory, for telling a story.

   2012 March 28, Brian Hayes, “Pixels or Perish”, in American Scientist, volume 100, number 2, page 106

   He concisely explains that Whig histories tend to "praise revolutions [for history of science, we could read novelties, ideas or individuals] provided they have been successful, emphasise certain principles of progress in the past and produce a story which is the ratification if not the glorification of the present".

   2012 October 3, Rebekah Higgitt, “Why whiggish won't do”, in The Guardian, →ISSN

2. transitiveTo give the reason for, justification for, or cause of.

   It is tempting to speculate about the incentives or compulsions that might explain why anyone would take to the skies in [the] basket [of a balloon]: perhaps out of a desire to escape the gravity of this world or to get a preview of the next; […].

   2013 June 7, David Simpson, “Fantasy of navigation”, in The Guardian Weekly, volume 188, number 26, page 36

   Synonyms: expound, elaborate, recce, elucidate, bring home, account for

3. obsoleteTo make flat, smooth out.
4. obsoleteTo unfold or make visible.

   April 14, 1684, John Evelyn, a letter sent to the Royal Society concerning the damage done to his gardens by the preceding winter The horse-chestnut is […] ready to explain its leaf.

5. intransitiveTo make something plain or intelligible.

   She tried to explain but he wouldn’t listen.

   2 more examples

   It is easy to modify the account to take this into account, by explaining not just in terms of a set of reasons but in terms of a set of reason–weight pairs.

   2012, Alexander R. Pruss, “The Leibnizian Cosmological Argument”, in William Lane Craig, J. P. Moreland, editors, The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, page 56

   Like their Western counterparts, local media engages in shorthand - it reports rather than explains.

   2019 July 9, Patrick Gathara, “The problem is not 'negative' Western media coverage of Africa”, in Al Jazeera English