elaboration

[ih-lab-uh-rey-shuhn]

noun

1. an act or instance of elaborating.

2. the state of being elaborated; elaborateness.

3. something that is elaborated.

4. Psychiatry.,  an unconscious process of expanding and embellishing a detail, especially while recalling and describing a representation in a dream so that latent content of the dream is brought into a logical and comprehensible order.

Other Word Forms

• self-elaboration noun

Word History and Origins

Origin of elaboration¹

First recorded in 1570–80; from Latin ēlabōrātiōn-, stem of ēlabōrātiō, from ēlabōrāt(us) “worked out” (past participle of ēlabōrāre “to work out, produce through labor”; elaborate ) + -iō -ion

Example Sentences

It does not seek the new, but demands endless repetition of the same themes, merely with greater elaboration, gaudier technical effects and greater expense.

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Here repeated rhythms are overlayed by a large ensemble featuring all the festival performers in ecstatic elaborations.

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Everything else is just elaboration on that basic plot.

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He acknowledged that speculation about a lab leak is not in itself a conspiracy theory, but that doesn’t go for the elaborations that many of its adherents have made of it.

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"These results help us understand the evolutionary history of horns and antlers and could suggest that differences in other ruminant cranial appendages, like ossicones and pronghorns, are also elaborations on a shared ancestral cranial appendage."

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Related Words

• amplification