imply
Language: English
Part of speech: verb
Pronunciation: ipa: /ɪmˈplaɪ/
rhymes: -aɪ
Forms: form: implies
form: implying
form: implied
form: implied
form: no-table-tags
form: glossary
form: imply
form: imply
form: implied
form: imply
form: impliest
form: implied
form: impliedst
form: implies
form: implieth
form: implied
form: imply
form: implied
form: imply
form: implied
form: imply
form: -
form: implying
form: implied
Etymology: 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.
Senses: examples: text: Correlation does not imply causation
text: The proposition that "all dogs are mammals" implies that my dog is a mammal.
text: 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.
ref: 2016, Grigoriy Blekherman, Daniel Plaumann, Rainer Sinn, Cynthia Vinzant, “Low-Rank Sum-of-Squares Representations on Varieties of Minimal Degree”, in arXiv:
glosses: To have as a necessary consequence; to lead to (something) as a consequence.
raw_tags: of a proposition
examples: text: When I state that your dog is brown, I am not implying that all dogs are brown.
glosses: To suggest by logical inference.
raw_tags: of a person
examples: text: What do you mean "we need to be more careful with hygiene"? Are you implying that I don't wash my hands?
text: 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.
ref: 2013, Margaret Helen Hobbs, Carla Rice, Gender and Women's Studies in Canada: Critical Terrain, →ISBN, page 13:
text: Naturally, the river wasn't wrinkled or creased at all— wrong words, implying something unfluid like skin, something unenduring, prey to age.
ref: 2019, Margaret Laurence, The Diviners:
text: 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.
ref: 2022, R. F. Kuang, Babel, HarperVoyager, page 470:
glosses: To hint; to insinuate; to suggest tacitly and avoid a direct statement.
raw_tags: of a person or proposition
examples: text: And in his bosome secretly there lay / An hatefull Snake, the which his taile vptyes / In many folds, and mortall sting implyes.
ref: 1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book I, Canto IV”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC:
glosses: To enfold, entangle.
Synonyms: sense: to have as a necessary consequence
word: entail
sense: to have as a necessary consequence
word: implicate
sense: to have as a necessary consequence
word: import
sense: to suggest tacitly
word: allude
sense: to suggest tacitly
word: hint
sense: to suggest tacitly
word: insinuate
sense: to suggest tacitly
word: suggest
sense: to suggest tacitly
word: infer
Derived terms: impliable
implier
misimply
Related terms: implicate
implication
implicative
implicit
implicitness
connotation
entail