explicate
Americanverb (used with object)
-
explicates,
present (3rd person singular)
-
explicated,
past participle, past
-
explicating
present participle
-
to make plain or clear; explain; interpret.
-
to develop (a principle, theory, etc.).
verb
-
to make clear or explicit; explain
-
to formulate or develop (a theory, hypothesis, etc)
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
-
explicatornoun
-
reexplicateverb (used with object)
-
explicativeadjective
-
unexplicatedadjective
-
well-explicatedadjective
Inflected Forms
Participles
Conjugated Forms
Present
-
explicatesimple
-
explicatessimple
-
have explicatedperfect
-
has explicatedperfect
-
am explicatingprogressive
-
are explicatingprogressive
-
is explicatingprogressive
-
have been explicatingperfect progressive
-
has been explicatingperfect progressive
Past
-
explicatedsimple
-
had explicatedperfect
-
was explicatingprogressive
-
were explicatingprogressive
-
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
The Vocabulary.com Top 1000
Looking to grow your vocabulary? Check out this interactive, curated word list from our team of English language specialists at Vocabulary.com – one of over 17,000 lists we've built to help learners worldwide!
ASVAB Word Knowledge
Interested in learning more words like this one? Our team at Vocabulary.com has got you covered! You can review flashcards, quiz yourself, practice spelling, and more – and it's all completely free to use!
Big Science
Want to remember this word for good? Start your learning journey today with our library of interactive, themed word lists built by the experts at Vocabulary.com – we'll help you make the most of your study time!
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:
In his 1998 book “Paradise Lost,” Schrag sought not simply to foretell the region’s future, but to explicate how its future foretold what was in store for the country as a whole.
From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 10, 2025
"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
Gefter takes the reader inside so many of Avedon’s photo shoots, and so deftly explicates his work, that you’re thirsty to sate your eyes with Avedon’s actual images.
From New York Times ● Oct. 19, 2020
Effectively a pastiche of St Aubyn's style, Smith's close reading illustrates and explicates simultaneously.
From Los Angeles Times ● Feb. 7, 2018
And among many other things, he ingeniously explicates the two contrary Motions of the Sun, from East to West, and vice versa, by one onely Motion upon a Spiral, turning about a Cone.
From Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - Vol 1 - 1666 Giving some Accompt of the present Undertakings, Studies, and Labours of the Ingenious in many considerable parts of the World by Henry Oldenburg
Then there’s a cultural element, he explicated, of “bringing in my Japanese-Midwest heritage by using an ingredient like panko, filtering it through the Italian-American-ish culinary lens.”
From Seattle Times ● Mar. 7, 2024
“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
"Although no laws are explicated in place to limit use or IVF or change practice, this is the time to act in order to not let it happen," Shahine said.
From Salon ● May 10, 2022
Like the secrets of Leonardo da Vinci as imagined and explicated by Mr. Brown, this issue stemmed from a code hidden in plain sight: the book’s bar code.
From New York Times ● Jul. 29, 2021
They were only implicitly or virtually what we call them, and we human witnesses first explicated them and made them 'real.'
From Meaning of Truth by William James
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
Pinchin spends several pages explicating their personal animus, which ostensibly stems from an arcane debate over the location of bluefin spawning grounds but seems really to be about how scientists should position themselves vis-a-vis industry.
From Salon ● Aug. 2, 2023
Further, most of these decisions were engaged in a similar endeavor: explicating how rights relate to one another, and why the structure of constitutional law requires some unenumerated rights in order to function.
From Slate ● Jun. 25, 2023
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
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.
