explicate
Americanverb (used with object)
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explicates,
present (3rd person singular)
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explicated,
past participle, past
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explicating
present participle
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to make plain or clear; explain; interpret.
-
to develop (a principle, theory, etc.).
verb
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to make clear or explicit; explain
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to formulate or develop (a theory, hypothesis, etc)
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
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explicatornoun
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reexplicateverb (used with object)
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explicativeadjective
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unexplicatedadjective
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well-explicatedadjective
Inflected Forms
Participles
Conjugated Forms
Present
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explicatesimple
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explicatessimple
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have explicatedperfect
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has explicatedperfect
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am explicatingprogressive
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are explicatingprogressive
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is explicatingprogressive
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have been explicatingperfect progressive
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has been explicatingperfect progressive
Past
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explicatedsimple
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had explicatedperfect
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was explicatingprogressive
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were explicatingprogressive
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had been explicatingperfect progressive
Future
Etymology
Origin of explicate
1525–35; < Latin explicātus unfolded, set forth, past participle of explicāre, equivalent to ex- ex- 1 + plicāre to fold; see -ate 1
Explanation
To explicate is to explain or interpret something, maybe putting it in plain terms to make it more comprehensible for others. It might help to remember that it begins with "ex-," like the word explain, which is similar in meaning. The verb explicate comes from the Latin explicāre, which means "to unfold or unravel." This is a good description of a word that means to explain something to make it clearer and more easily understandable. Think of a puzzle or mystery: when you solve it, you sometimes have to explicate how you arrived at the solution, telling how you used the clues given to find the answer.
Vocabulary lists containing explicate
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
ABC took that step after Rasmussen failed to respond suitably to a questionnaire 538 submitted asking Rasmussen to explicate its polling methodology.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 19, 2024
"But I do think it's fair to say the burden is on the firm to explicate and help develop appropriate guardrails to prevent nefarious uses."
From Science Daily ● May 2, 2024
Acosta then asked Dean to explicate what happens if Trump commits perjury, and whether he could be prosecuted for lying.
From Salon ● Nov. 6, 2023
Mind-scientists labor to explicate us, with theories ranging from Freudian psychoanalysis to neuro-evo-psycho-cognitive whatever.
From Scientific American ● Dec. 24, 2022
The evening’s speaker might be a graduate student assigned to explicate a recent paper from Europe, or a visiting luminary discussing his own work.
From "Big Science" by Michael Hiltzik
No one understands, explicates and empathizes with mothers and daughters, love and pain, life and all it entails, quite like Ms. Hudes.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Dec. 12, 2025
On the Michelangelo side, “All Things Move” admirably explicates the art of the Sistine Chapel and the history of its moment.
From Washington Post ● Apr. 3, 2023
Joni Mitchell's song "Big Yellow Taxi" explicates this duality nicely: there is paradise, and there are parking lots, and never the twain shall meet.
From Salon ● Mar. 22, 2020
Effectively a pastiche of St Aubyn's style, Smith's close reading illustrates and explicates simultaneously.
From Los Angeles Times ● Feb. 7, 2018
In this remark, Dacier explicates Aristotle's injunction that the poet should sketch the general outline of the fable before filling in episodes and naming characters, thus making it general and universal.
From The Preface to Aristotle's Art of Poetry by Samuel Holt Monk
“What really needs to be explicated is not the plain vanilla meaning of insurrection but the whole phrase — insurrection against the United States Constitution,” Delahunty testified on Friday.
From Seattle Times ● Nov. 3, 2023
“What really needs to be explicated is not the plain vanilla meaning of insurrection but the whole phrase - insurrection against the United States Constitution,” Delahunty testified on Friday.
From Washington Times ● Nov. 3, 2023
That point is meticulously explicated by TechCrunch's Natasha Lomas in her surgical analysis.
From Salon ● Aug. 11, 2023
For Dylan, songs aren’t just artworks to be analyzed and explicated; they’re visions that beget visions, prompts for his own madcap and macabre yarn-spinning.
From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 27, 2022
The manner of the breaking and flawing of them, explicated by Figures.
From Micrographia Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses with Observations and Inquiries Thereupon by Robert Hooke
Mr. Meslow does an excellent job explicating the ensuing tensions between ABC and the showrunners, which would ensure that the program was always a deeply flawed translation of its creators’ vision.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Apr. 17, 2026
But to physicists bent on explicating those fundamental laws, black holes are a Coney Island of mysteries and imagination.
From New York Times ● Oct. 10, 2022
“I think all the body cameras are going to be key in explicating exactly what was said and what was done.”
From Seattle Times ● Jun. 13, 2020
You can help guide your three-man vessel by expressing your appreciatio, and explicating exactly how meaningful to you this time spent together is.
From Slate ● Aug. 12, 2019
This implicit or virtual presence in experience in general, Kant calls their transcendental character, and the process of explicating them is his famous Transcendental Deduction.
From The Approach to Philosophy by Ralph Barton Perry
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
