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imply

From Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

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Etymology

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From Middle English implien, emplien, borrowed from Old French emplier, from Latin implicare (“to infold, involve”), from in (“in”) + plicare (“to fold”). Doublet of employ and implicate.

Pronunciation

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Verb

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imply (third-person singular simple present implies, present participle implying, simple past and past participle implied)

  1. (transitive, of a proposition) to have as a necessary consequence; to lead to (something) as a consequence
    Correlation does not imply causation
    The proposition that "all dogs are mammals" implies that my dog is a mammal.
    • 2016, Grigoriy Blekherman, Daniel Plaumann, Rainer Sinn, Cynthia Vinzant, “Low-Rank Sum-of-Squares Representations on Varieties of Minimal Degree”, in arXiv‎[1]:
      Our upper bound is the best possible, and it implies the existence of low-rank factorizations of positive semidefinite bivariate matrix polynomials and representations of biforms as sums of few squares.
  2. (transitive, of a person) to suggest by logical inference
    When I state that your dog is brown, I am not implying that all dogs are brown.
  3. (transitive, of a person or proposition) to hint; to insinuate; to suggest tacitly and avoid a direct statement
    What do you mean "we need to be more careful with hygiene"? Are you implying that I don't wash my hands?
    • 2013, Margaret Helen Hobbs, Carla Rice, Gender and Women's Studies in Canada: Critical Terrain, →ISBN, page 13:
      The wrongminded notion of the feminist movement which implied it was anti-male carried with it the wrongminded assumption that all female space would necessarily be an environment where patriarchy and sexist thinking would be absent.
    • 2019, Margaret Laurence, The Diviners:
      Naturally, the river wasn't wrinkled or creased at all— wrong words, implying something unfluid like skin, something unenduring, prey to age.
    • 2022, R. F. Kuang, Babel, HarperVoyager, page 470:
      Both French and English had once used parcel to refer to pieces of land that made up an estate, but when it evolved to imply an item of business in both, it retained its connotations of small fragmentariness in French, whereas in English it simply meant a package.
  4. (archaic) to enfold, entangle.

Usage notes

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Conjugation

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Conjugation of imply
infinitive (to) imply
present tense past tense
1st-person singular imply implied
2nd-person singular imply, impliest† implied, impliedst†
3rd-person singular implies, implieth† implied
plural imply
subjunctive imply implied
imperative imply —
participles implying implied

†Archaic or obsolete.

Synonyms

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Translations

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See also

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Further reading

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