explicate
Americanverb (used with object)
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to make plain or clear; explain; interpret.
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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:
"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
Mind-scientists labor to explicate us, with theories ranging from Freudian psychoanalysis to neuro-evo-psycho-cognitive whatever.
From Scientific American ● Dec. 24, 2022
Even for those who have long studied her work, Prymachenko’s appeal can be difficult to explicate.
From Los Angeles Times ● May 10, 2022
This is related to a question of ethics, which is what is falling in that lacuna between greatness and crap that only criticism can both explicate and reify in some way.
From New York Times ● Jan. 7, 2022
In 1867, nearly a decade after the publication of Origin, he began to complete a new manuscript, The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, in which he would fully explicate this view of inheritance.
From "The Gene" by Siddhartha Mukherjee
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
Effectively a pastiche of St Aubyn's style, Smith's close reading illustrates and explicates simultaneously.
From Los Angeles Times ● Feb. 7, 2018
Instead, as its title explicates, “Gallipoli” locates its bloody third act action in a Turkish peninsula, where battalions from Australia and New Zealand battled Turks in the name of the far-off British Empire.
From Salon ● Aug. 27, 2017
According to this Hypothesis he explicates all the Operations of Plants and Animals, without having any recourse to the Soul.
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 Oldenburg, Henry
“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
Women don’t really show up, except as robots, until the rise of the “It Girl” in Hollywood, a subject thoroughly explicated last year in a biography of her creator, Elinor Glyn.
From New York Times ● Jun. 25, 2023
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 Hooke, Robert
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
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
Precious Auntie, devastated, leaves a sheath of papers for her daughter to read, explicating the sorrowful and somber truth of their generational legacy.
From Seattle Times ● May 31, 2022
But there, covered with alluring awe, a wall of impenetrable mystery confronts us with its baffling "Thus far, and no farther, shall thine explicating gaze read the secrets of destiny."
From The Destiny of the Soul A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life by Alger, William Rounseville
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.
