verb

• 1 formal Represent in outline.

  ‘Hobhouse had already adumbrated the idea of a welfare state’

  More example sentences

  • ‘This latter course, in fact, is already adumbrated at certain junctures in the Opus Postumum.’
  • ‘The outlines of the legend of the politically naïve scholar are already adumbrated in the biographical essay Heidegger submitted to the de-Nazification committee in 1945.’
  • ‘(Reading across texts for a moment, this idea has been adumbrated in Kundera's earlier book Laughable Loves ).’
  • ‘Like any short introduction, it does not have time to say very much, but what it does say is enough to adumbrate the major ideas to follow.’
  • ‘As to 5: The answer is plainly ‘Yes’ and for the reasons already adumbrated.’
  • ‘Here then, already adumbrated, is the double emphasis on heaven and home, or on home as heaven.’
  • ‘Some of the matters I have already adumbrated seem to me to bear upon that.’
  • ‘An introduction sketches the book's key terms and thereby adumbrates its themes, especially the principal pair of beauty and the infinite.’

  1. 1.1Indicate faintly.
     More example sentences

     • ‘the walls were only adumbrated by the meagre light’
     Synonyms

     augur, presage, portend, foretell, prophesy, predict
• 2 formal Foreshadow (a future event)

  ‘tenors solemnly adumbrate the fate of the convicted sinner’

  More example sentences

  • ‘Toward the middle of her 1928 novel Quicksand, Nella Larsen thematizes her authorial relation to the literary past in a scene that uncannily adumbrates the future demise of her career.’
• 3 formal Overshadow.

  ‘her happy reminiscences were adumbrated by consciousness of something else’

  More example sentences

  • ‘Consciousness does not perspectivally adumbrate itself.’

  Synonyms

  hide, conceal, cover, veil, shroud, screen, mask, cloak, cast a shadow over, shadow, envelop, mantle, block, block out, blank out, obliterate, eclipse, overshadow