elaboration

American  

[ih-lab-uh-rey-shuhn] / ɪˌlæb əˈreɪ ʃən /

noun

• elaborations
  plural

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

Derived Forms

• self-elaboration
  noun

Inflected Forms

Nouns

• elaborations
  plural

Etymology

Origin of elaboration

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”; see elaborate) + -iō -ion

Explanation

Elaboration means "adding details." Kids are famous for answering "good" when asked how school was and "nothing" when asked what they did there. If pressed for elaboration, they might talk about recess, lunch, and even what they learned. Elaboration is the result of going that extra mile, such as when your history teacher asks for five paragraphs on the Fall of Rome, and you write three pages, or when your friend, instead of giving you a regular birthday card, creates a mini-scrapbook with photos and mementos from the past year. As you can see, elaboration takes time and energy because you go into greater detail than usual.

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

elaboration elaborations

In the WSJ interview, Trump moved the deadline to Tuesday, and on Sunday afternoon, without elaboration, Trump posted “Tuesday, 8:00 P.M. Eastern Time!”

From The Wall Street Journal ● Apr. 6, 2026

“No,” he said without hesitation or further elaboration.

From Los Angeles Times ● Feb. 17, 2026

Lilly did not respond to a request for elaboration on the point.

From Barron's ● Nov. 17, 2025

Everything else is just elaboration on that basic plot.

From Salon ● Jun. 12, 2025

Some of these carvings suggest that the objects may have originated with the recognition and elaboration of some chance resemblance.

From "History of Art, Volume 1" by H.W. Janson

"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."

From Science Daily ● May 20, 2024

Slow tempo melodic elaborations that had a strong emotive emphasis became the insignia of his performances.

From BBC ● Jan. 12, 2024

They are in many senses key to L.A.’s story of place but also the enduring elaborations the city continues to tell about itself.

From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 7, 2019

Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of the Philip K. Dick story stands as one of his finest elaborations on established genre conventions, in this case film noir put to the service of speculative science fiction.

From Washington Post ● Aug. 17, 2018

Examples, explanations, violated expectations, elaborations, sequences, causes, and effects are arcs of coherence that pinpoint how one statement follows from another.

From "The Sense of Style" by Steven Pinker

Related Words

• amplification