to elucidate someone's reasoning
- phrasal verb
- /ɪˈluːsɪˌdeɪt/
- Formal
- The professor encouraged the student to elucidate his reasoning behind each answer during the oral exam.
Examples
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In her report, she attempted to elucidate the committee's reasoning for rejecting the proposal.
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Can you elucidate her reasoning?
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Could you elucidate your reasoning for choosing this particular method over others?
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I need to elucidate his reasoning further.
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Could you elucidate your reasoning for choosing this particular method over others?
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The professor encouraged the student to elucidate his reasoning behind each answer during the oral exam.
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In her report, she attempted to elucidate the committee's reasoning for rejecting the proposal.
Synonyms
To make something clear by describing it in simple words
To explain something clearly and in detail
To give more details or explain something more fully
To make something clear or easier to understand
To help people understand something by explaining it
Explain something in detail so people understand it
Help people understand a topic more clearly
To explain something so it is easy to understand
To describe something clearly and in detail
To explain something clearly in detail
To think about and explain your ideas clearly to yourself or others
Antonyms
How Clear
- Formal
Surface Forms
Morphology
elucidate + someone's + reasoning
The phrase is fully compositional: 'elucidate' means to make clear and 'someone's reasoning' denotes that person's thought process, so combined they straightforwardly mean to make a person's thinking clear. This follows a standard verb + object pattern found cross-linguistically, so a B1 learner who knows the constituent words would be able to infer the MWE meaning.
Etymology
Elucidate someone's reasoning comes from the image of shining light on a person's thoughts, because elucidate comes from words meaning 'light'. So to elucidate someone's reasoning is to make their thinking clear, which is why it means 'to explain how someone thought'.