adumbrate

English

Etymology

Borrowed from Latin adumbrātus (“represented in outline”), from adumbrāre (“cast a shadow on”), from umbra (“shadow”).

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /ˈædʌmˌbɹeɪt/

• Audio (Southern England):

  (file)

Verb

adumbrate (third-person singular simple present adumbrates, present participle adumbrating, simple past and past participle adumbrated)

1. To foreshadow vaguely.
   • 1962 October, G. Freeman Allen, “The New Look in Scotland's Northern Division—II”, in Modern Railways, page 270:

     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.

   • 2020, Kristen Figgins, “The Integrity of Nature”, in Jonathan Elmore, editor, Fiction and the Sixth Mass Extinction, Rowman & Littlefield, →ISBN:

     This piece will perform a micro-excavation of these toplayers of the literary soil to suggest anxiogenic literature has the potential not only to adumbrate the post-apocalypse, a common theme in contemporary literature, but also to anticipate the post-Anthropocene.

2. To give a vague outline.
   • 1996, John M. Cooper, “Introduction”, in Plato: Complete Works, Hackett, page xxii:

     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.

3. To obscure or overshadow.

Derived terms

• adumbrant
• adumbration
• adumbrative

Related terms

• See umbra#Derived_terms

Translations

To foreshadow vaguely.

• French: pressentir (fr), supputer (fr)
• Japanese: ぼんやりと暗示する (bonyarito anji suru), 予示する (yoji suru)
• Malay:

  Jawi: مڠعلامتکن

  Rumi: mengalamatkan

To give a vague outline.

• Bulgarian: скицирам (bg) (skiciram)
• Czech: nastínit
• Dutch: de contouren vluchtig schetsen
• German: umreißen (de)
• Japanese: 概説する (gaisetsu suru)
• Malay:

  Jawi: ممبايڠکن

  Rumi: membayangkan

• Portuguese: adumbrar
• Russian: наброса́ть (ru) pf (nabrosátʹ)

To obscure or overshadow.

• Dutch: overschaduwen (nl)
• Japanese: 暗くする (kuraku suru)

Latin

Pronunciation

• (Classical Latin) IPA^(key): /a.dumˈbraː.te/, [äd̪ʊmˈbräːt̪ɛ]
• (modern Italianate Ecclesiastical) IPA^(key): /a.dumˈbra.te/, [äd̪umˈbräːt̪e]

Verb

adumbrāte

1. second-person plural present active imperative of adumbrō