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

"That's really where we can tease out whether it's AI-generated or it's real."

From BBC • Mar. 2, 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

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 course of this central relationship is one that is hard to tease out of official investigations and even prisoner memoirs, but my sense is that it has evolved little, if at all.

From "Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing" by Ted Conover

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