elaboration

Noun

elaboration (countable and uncountable, plural elaborations)

1. The act or process of producing or refining with labor; improvement by successive operations; refinement.
   • Digging deeper, the invention of eyeglasses is an elaboration of the more fundamental development of optics technology. The ability of a segment of a glass sphere to magnify whatever is placed before it was known around the year 1000, when the spherical segment was called a reading stone,[…].2013 September-October, Henry Petroski, “The Evolution of Eyeglasses”, in American Scientist
2. 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
   • the elaboration of food into chyme
   • the elaboration of chyle, or sap, or tissues
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. The level of processing of a message or argument.