Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun The act of elaborating, or working out or producing; production or formation by a gradual process: as, the elaboration of sap by a tree.
  • noun The act of working out and finishing with great care and exactness in detail; the act of improving or refining by successive processes; painstaking labor.
  • noun Labored finish or completeness; detailed execution; careful work in all parts: as, the elaboration of the picture is wonderful.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun The act or process of producing or refining with labor; improvement by successive operations; refinement.
  • noun (Physiol.) The natural process of formation or assimilation, performed by the living organs in animals and vegetables, by which a crude substance is changed into something of a higher order

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun The act or process of producing or refining with labor; improvement by successive operations; refinement.
  • noun The natural process of formation or assimilation, performed by the living organs in animals and vegetables, by which a crude substance is changed into something of a higher order; as, the elaboration of food into chyme; the elaboration of chyle, or sap, or tissues.
  • noun computing Setting up a hierarchy of calculated constants in a language such as Ada so that the values of one or more of them determine others further down in the hierarchy.
  • noun electronics The process of taking a parsed tree of an abstract integrated circuit definition in a language such as Verilog and creating a hierarchy of module instances that ends with primitive (atomic) gates and statements.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun the result of improving something
  • noun a discussion that provides additional information
  • noun developing in intricate and painstaking detail
  • noun marked by elaborately complex detail
  • noun addition of extra material or illustration or clarifying detail

Etymologies

Sorry, no etymologies found.

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Examples

  • Further elaboration is needless and comments are unnecessary, we know.

    Noble Simplicity and the Liturgiologist Edmund Bishop 2009

  • All your elaboration is post facto rationalization.

    Matthew Yglesias » Jessica Valenti on Anti-Feminists and So-Called “Hook-up Culture” 2009

  • Some elaboration is worth it, to unveil the full lunacy of the phrase.

    Matthew Yglesias » Unleashing Chiang 2009

  • Chant and its polyphonic elaboration is most fitting to the holy action at the altar, and makes the liturgical project true to itself.

    Why Are the People the Only Focus? 2009

  • But to just say “public WiFi networks” without further elaboration is misleading – unless there really are publicly operated WiFi networks that you can access freely just walking down the street without any registration or other special preparation.

    Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-07-05 2009

  • According to the label of La Motisanne, an artisan absinthe made by Roger Etienne (which by the way has the lot number written on the label by hand), This home made elaboration is an authentic Absinth from the original region of this drink, the Val-de-Travers.

    The Rise and Fall of the Green Fairy Heather McDougal 2008

  • According to the label of La Motisanne, an artisan absinthe made by Roger Etienne (which by the way has the lot number written on the label by hand), This home made elaboration is an authentic Absinth from the original region of this drink, the Val-de-Travers.

    Archive 2008-07-01 Heather McDougal 2008

  • LIMBAUGH: The -- there's a complicated answer to this and I'm going to have answer some of it in the monologue in the next hour, but one of the simple answers that will require some elaboration is that a lot of money is coming from these kooks -- and I'm not talking about just the blacks -- I'm talking about a whole kook-fringe base because George Soros is running it --

    Archive 2008-06-01 2008

  • LIMBAUGH: The -- there's a complicated answer to this and I'm going to have answer some of it in the monologue in the next hour, but one of the simple answers that will require some elaboration is that a lot of money is coming from these kooks -- and I'm not talking about just the blacks -- I'm talking about a whole kook-fringe base because George Soros is running it --

    Your Right Hand Thief 2008

  • As a person who spent some years in the Mormon church I think the elaboration is important.

    Balkinization 2007

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