tease out

British

verb

(tr, adverb) to extract (information) with difficulty

"Collins English Dictionary — Complete & Unabridged" 2012 Digital Edition © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012

tease out Idioms

Lure out, obtain or extract with effort, as in We had a hard time teasing the wedding date out of him. This term alludes to the literal sense of tease, “untangle or release something with a pointed tool.” [Mid-1900s]

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.

Their data categories, such as for managers, may have been too broad to tease out the effect of DEI.

From The Wall Street Journal • Apr. 13, 2026

Many advanced economies are so thoroughly distorted by the land-finance nexus that it can be hard to even tease out the consequences.

From Slate • Nov. 4, 2025

Helpfully, King hasn’t written any books specifically about Derry, granting the Muschiettis and co-showrunners Brad Caleb Kane and Jason Fuchs relative freedom to tease out what Andy describes as the book’s enigmas.

From Salon • Oct. 26, 2025

In analyzing the reviews, the researchers used a language processing technique to tease out the most common topics from the reviews, organized them into themes, and measured how they changed over time.

From Science Daily • Nov. 25, 2024

“The methods of working with that data to really tease out the important information have come a very, very long way,” Krippner said.

From "Mountain of Fire" by Rebecca E. F. Barone

Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023