Adumbrate
verb ·Moderate ·College level
Definitions
- 1 To foreshadow vaguely. transitive
"From track level, its operating floor looks particularly capacious, but there is a vacant space at one end which was designed to accommodate the control panel for the Perth-Inverness C.T.C. scheme; this was adumbrated as long ago as the 1955 Modernisation Plan, but now seems to be regarded as an unjustifiable luxury."
- 2 give to understand wordnet
- 3 To give a vague outline. transitive
"Accordingly, even though readers always and understandably speak of the theories adumbrated by Socrates here as "Plato's theories", one ought not to speak of them so without some compunction--the writing itself, and also Plato the author, present these always in a spirit of open-ended exploration, and sometimes there are contextual clues indicating that Socrates exaggerates or goes what the argument truly justifies, and so on."
- 4 describe roughly or briefly or give the main points or summary of wordnet
- 5 To obscure or overshadow. transitive
Antonyms
All antonymsExample
More examples"My girlfriend's terse responses began to adumbrate her desire to leave me and move back to Odessa."
Etymology
Borrowed from Latin adumbrātus (“represented in outline”), from adumbrāre (“cast a shadow on”), from umbra (“shadow”).
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.