How to Use explicate in a Sentence

explicate

verb
Definition of explicatenext
Synonyms for explicatenext
  • The film ties itself into knots to explicate the bad news.
    — Owen Gleiberman, Variety, 31 Aug. 2022
  • There normally isn’t any doubt that the expense claims are valid, but the IRS loves to impose record-keeping foot faults too lengthy to explicate.
    — Ryan Ellis, National Review, 13 July 2021
  • The songs, when not explicating the wisp of a story, describe varieties of cat, such as the Gumbie Cat and the Railway Cat, while the cast, on-screen as on-stage, have cat ears, fur, and tails.
    — Daniel Drake, The New York Review of Books, 4 Jan. 2020
  • Kane credits the show’s cast and crew for explicating to her why Pelia would, say, request that the Enterprise vent plasma out of the warp nacelles.
    — Adam B. Vary, Variety, 15 June 2023
  • But the term’s meaning was (and remains) opaque and has never been fully explicated.
    — vanityfair.com, 17 July 2017
  • Mangold’s goal was to make a film worthy of the iconic hero and the movie star embodying him — and, perhaps, explicate his own feelings about the world passing him by.
    — Adam B. Vary, Variety, 21 June 2023
  • Far from explicating this less-is-more paradox, the EPA’s 170-page report does not even acknowledge it.
    — Marlo Lewis, National Review, 29 Dec. 2023
  • To explicate this sense of random overlap, Auster gives us four parallel versions of Archie.
    — The Washington Post, The Denver Post, 26 Jan. 2017
  • What can be said about Queen Bey that hasn’t already been said, done, sang, texted, tweeted, explicated, unpacked, imagined?
    — Angela Helm, The Root, 11 Sep. 2017
  • Here the authors celebrate Blackness and all of its hues while explicating the tensions between being seen and unseen all at once.
    — Valerie Strauss, Washington Post, 10 July 2018
  • At the base of our consciousness, all a novelist is is somebody who's trying to explicate the human condition.
    — Gideon Lichfield, WIRED, 19 July 2023
  • The author explicates Stone’s fiction and expands its context.
    — Dwight Garner, New York Times, 9 Mar. 2020
  • After spending thousands of words explicating the plight of Asians attempting to make it in New York, Yang spells out his contempt for the entire enterprise.
    — Jon Baskin, The New York Review of Books, 4 Apr. 2019
  • As researchers, Harris and Coleman explicate the many Black character cliches in modern horror that we were all conditioned to live with and love.
    — Malik Peay, Rolling Stone, 7 Feb. 2023
  • To say more would spoil this film’s abundant surprises, and vainly attempt to explicate much that is mysterious.
    — David Mermelstein, WSJ, 28 Oct. 2017
  • Thompson brilliantly explicates the nuances of the answer.
    — Adam Lashinsky, Fortune, 6 Sep. 2019
  • Rob Dunn steers our attention toward the biota under our noses as part of a broader project to explicate the circumstances that prompt new life forms, and adaptive behaviors, to appear.
    — Rebecca Giggs, The Atlantic, 9 Nov. 2021
  • There are both philosophical and moral underpinnings to a routine where a man sticks an arrow through his head to the laughter of others, and Martin explicates this in clear and beautiful prose.
    — John Warner, chicagotribune.com, 3 May 2017
  • His particular focus was in explicating the thoughts of the great Chinese sage Confucius as they were interpreted over the centuries.
    — Douglas Martin, New York Times, 17 July 2017
  • As numerous scholars and thinkers have explicated, that notion is too simple.
    — Jillian Steinhauer, The New Republic, 21 Aug. 2023
  • Related Articles To explicate this sense of random overlap, Auster gives us four parallel versions of Archie.
    — David L. Ulin, Twin Cities, 8 Feb. 2017
  • Yet the generation that knows Jim Crow America only from hearsay ought to know what Belafonte explicates in this aggrieved, damaged, nonpareil persona.
    — Armond White, National Review, 11 Mar. 2020
  • On the other hand, a sense of privacy and inscrutability is intrinsic to the experience of reading him: An Ashbery whose work had been fully explicated wouldn’t be Ashbery at all.
    — Evan Kindley, New Republic, 17 July 2017
  • Trump’s more outspoken critics, for their part, have sought to explicate what exactly makes DeSantis so attractive.
    — Audrey Clare Farley, The New Republic, 30 Jan. 2023
  • At various moments throughout this avian journey, Ms. Uglow swoops down to examine and explicate with hawk-like acuity the ludic complexities of Lear’s writings.
    — Jonathan Cott, WSJ, 20 Apr. 2018
  • Rather than using pictures to illustrate words, or words to explicate pictures, Mr. Selznick traded off batches of each, alternating between sequences of text and illustration across a vast number of pages.
    — Meghan Cox Gurdon, wsj.com, 20 Apr. 2023
  • Long passages in Comey’s thesis are also devoted to explicating the various sorts of pride that Niebuhr argued could afflict human beings — most notably, moral pride and spiritual pride, which can lead to the sin of self-righteousness.
    — New York Times, 12 Apr. 2018
  • Farhad Manjoo does an excellent job of explicating the ethical, practical and political quandaries faced by Facebook in its News Feed.
    — New York Times, 12 May 2017
  • The critic Richard Schickel appears to explicate a version of auteur theory as a way of praising famously independent-minded directors, like Capra and Welles.
    — Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker, 28 Nov. 2022
  • Each of the dozen circus acts is nominally inspired by a tarot card, cursorily explicated by the show's cunningly naive hostess, Divinity Price.
    — Chicago Reader, 26 July 2017

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'explicate.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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