explicate

present singular third person explicates · participle present explicating · participle past explicated · past explicated

1. transitiveTo explain meticulously or in great detail.

   My homework is to explicate a poem.

   4 more examples

   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

   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

   Synonyms: analyze, elucidate, explicitate

comparative more explicate · superlative most explicate

1. obsoleteEvolved; unfolded.