Etimology
From Middle English explanen, from Old French explaner, from Latin explanō (“I flatten, spread out, make plain or clear, explain”), from ex- (“out”) + planō (“I flatten, make level”), from planus (“level, plain”); see plain and plane. Compare esplanade, splanade. Displaced Old English reċċan.
verb
explain (third-person singular simple present explains, present participle explaining, simple past and past participle explained)
(transitive, intransitive) To make plain, manifest, or intelligible; to clear of obscurity; to illustrate the meaning of.
(transitive) To give a valid excuse for past behavior.
(obsolete) To make flat, smooth out.
(obsolete) To unfold or make visible.
(intransitive) To make something plain or intelligible.
Examples
She is about to explain a chapter of the Bible to the Sunday School students.
She tried to explain but he wouldn’t listen.
The boy became volubly friendly and bubbling over with unexpected humour and high spirits. He tried to persuade Cicely to stay away from the ball-room for a fourth dance. Nobody would miss them, he explained.
Drawings and pictures are more than mere ornaments in scientific discourse. Blackboard sketches, geological maps, diagrams of molecular structure, astronomical photographs, MRI images, the many varieties of statistical charts and graphs: These pictorial devices are indispensable tools for presenting evidence, for explaining a theory, for telling a story.
It is tempting to speculate about the incentives or compulsions that might explain why anyone would take to the skies in [the] basket [of a balloon]: perhaps out of a desire to escape the gravity of this world or to get a preview of the next; […].
The horse-chestnut is […] ready to explain its leaf.
It is easy to modify the account to take this into account, by explaining not just in terms of a set of reasons but in terms of a set of reason–weight pairs.
Like their Western counterparts, local media engages in shorthand - it reports rather than explains.
Related words
synonyms
(give a sufficiently detailed report): expound, elaborate, recce
related terms
explanation
explanatorily
explanatory