Word.ws English Dictionary

explicature

UK/ɛkˈsplɪkətʃə/US/ɛkˈsplɪkət͡ʃɚ/

explicature noun: something explicitly expressed in an utterance, as opposed to what is implicit.

Noun

explicature (countable and uncountable, plural explicatures)

  1. Something explicitly expressed in an utterance, as opposed to what is implicit.
    • In relevance theory terms, he must construct a hypothesis about the explicit content of Ally's utterance;that is, he mustrely upon both the words she uses in this utterance and an inferencing process to construct an explicature.2012, Jodie Clark, Language, Sex and Social Structure
    • If the speaker was your flat-mate and you had a habit of borrowing her property without permission, she might be asking you if you'd 'borrowed' the book she owned (explicature) and the utterance might be taken as a demand for its return.2013, Peter Grundy, Doing Pragmatics, page 136

Forms of explicature

pluralexplicatures

Origin of explicature

From explicate + -ure, after implicature.

Questions about explicature

What does explicature mean?
Explicature means something explicitly expressed in an utterance, as opposed to what is implicit.
What part of speech is explicature?
Explicature is a noun.
How do you pronounce explicature?
Explicature is pronounced /ɛkˈsplɪkətʃə/ (UK).
What is the plural of explicature?
The plural of explicature is explicatures.

Words near explicature in the dictionary

  1. explicatives
  2. explicator
  3. explicators
  4. explicatory
  5. explicatum
  6. explicature
  7. explicatures
  8. explicit
  9. explicit function
  10. explicit functions
  11. explicit modeling

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: explicature (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “explicature.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/explicature. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.