explain

[ex·plain]

To explain something is to define it, show how it works, or just tell what it is. Explaining helps people understand.

...

To flatten; to spread out; to unfold; to expand.

Verb
serve as a reason or cause or justification of; "Your need to sleep late does not excuse your late arrival at work"; "Her recent divorce amy explain her reluctance to date again"

Verb
make palin and comprehensible; "He explained the laws of physics to his students"

Verb
define; "The committe explained their plan for fund-raising to the Dean"


a.
To flatten; to spread out; to unfold; to expand.

a.
To make plain, manifest, or intelligible; to clear of obscurity; to expound; to unfold and illustrate the meaning of; as, to explain a chapter of the Bible.

v. i.
To give an explanation.


Explain

Ex*plain" , v. t. [imp. & p. p. Explained;p. pr. & vb. n. Explaining.] [L. explandare to flatten, spread out, explain; ex out+plandare to make level or plain, planus plain: cf. OF. esplaner, explaner. See Plain,a., and cf. Esplanade.] 1. To flatten; to spread out; to unfold; to expand. [Obs.]
The horse-chestnut is . . . ready to explain its leaf.
2. To make plain, manifest, or intelligible; to clear of obscurity; to expound; to unfold and illustrate the meaning of; as, to explain a chapter of the Bible.
Commentators to explain the difficult passages to you.
To explain away, to get rid of by explanation. "Those explain the meaning quite "away." Pope. Syn. -- To expound; interpret; elucidate; clear up.

Explain

Ex*plain", v. i. To give an explanation.

To flatten; to spread out; to unfold; to expand.

To give an explanation.

...

Usage Examples

Amazingly when you add life and consciousness to the equation you can actually explain some of the biggest puzzles of science.

Bracketing has turned all my experiences, remembered and present, into a gallery of miracles where I wander around dazzled by the beauty of events I cannot explain.

Animation can explain whatever the mind of man can conceive. This facility makes it the most versatile and explicit means of communication yet devised for quick mass appreciation.

Cricket makes no sense to me. I find it beautiful to watch and I like that they break for tea. That is very cool, but I don't understand. My friends from The Clash tried to explain it years and years ago, but I didn't understand what they were talking about.

Death and vulgarity are the only two facts in the nineteenth century that one cannot explain away.

Even very young children need to be informed about dying. Explain the concept of death very carefully to your child. This will make threatening him with it much more effective.

But for me, it is when a student has died. I find the death of a young person the most difficult and painful of times. To explain it to other young people, to see a bright future snuffed out, is just awful. I am haunted by those deaths.

For more than 200 years, materialists have promised that science will eventually explain everything in terms of physics and chemistry. Believers are sustained by the faith that scientific discoveries will justify their beliefs.

Feature-length film comedy is harder to pull off than the episodic sitcom - it doesn't have the same factory machinery up and running, teams of writers putting familiar characters through permutations - but that doesn't explain the widening quality gap that makes movie humor look like a genetic defective.

Misspelled Form

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Other Usage Examples

Another argument, vaguer and even less persuasive, is that gay marriage somehow does harm to heterosexual marriage. I have yet to meet anyone who can explain to me what this means. In what way would allowing same-sex partners to marry diminish the marriages of heterosexual couples?

How do you explain the bond between man and wife? Well, for one thing, it's private. What people do in their own marriage is their own business.

Because bankers measure their self-worth in money, and pay themselves a lot of it, they think they're fine fellows and don't need to explain themselves.

And I know this happens because I took economics, and I'd explain it to ya, but I flunked that course. Not my fault. They taught it at 8 o'clock in the morning. And there is absolutely nothing you can learn out of one bloodshot eye.

Complex, statistically improbable things are by their nature more difficult to explain than simple, statistically probable things.

Broadcasters or politicians or writers who think that they are respecting Struggle Street, the battlers, by dumbing things down into one-line sound bites are not respecting them, they are treating them with contempt. It's our job above all in politics to tackle the big issues and to explain them.

Always keep your smile. That's how I explain my long life.

Before we decide to trust you with this power, we ask you to stand before the public and explain your views. Justice may be blind, but it should not be deaf.

'Stress' was the catch-all every pamper-pedlar I spoke to used to explain why healthy women feel the need to be regularly patted, petted and preened into a state of babyish beatification.

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