explain

Verb

explain (third-person singular simple present explains, present participle explaining, simple past and past participle explained)

1. (transitive) To make plain, manifest, or intelligible; to clear of obscurity; to illustrate the meaning of.
   • The issue was explained to the governor in detail.
   • 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.1909 September 9, Archibald Marshall [pseudonym; Arthur Hammond Marshall], “A Court Ball”, in The Squire’s Daughter, London: Methuen & Co. […], →OCLC, page 9
2. (transitive) To give the reason for, justification for, or cause of.
   • 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; […].2013 June 7, David Simpson, “Fantasy of navigation”, in The Guardian Weekly, volume 188, number 26, page 36

   Synonyms:

   expound, elaborate, recce, elucidate, bring home, account for

3. (obsolete) To make flat, smooth out.
4. (obsolete) To unfold or make visible.
   • April 14, 1684, John Evelyn, a letter sent to the Royal Society concerning the damage done to his gardens by the preceding winter
     The horse-chestnut is […] ready to explain its leaf.
5. (intransitive) To make something plain or intelligible.
   • She tried to explain but he wouldn’t listen.
   • 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.2012, Alexander R. Pruss, “The Leibnizian Cosmological Argument”, in William Lane Craig, J. P. Moreland, editors, The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, page 56