adumbrate
Americanverb (used with object)
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adumbrates,
present (3rd person singular)
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adumbrated,
past participle, past
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adumbrating
present participle
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to produce a faint image or resemblance of; to outline or sketch.
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to foreshadow; prefigure.
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to darken or conceal partially; overshadow.
verb
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to outline; give a faint indication of
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to foreshadow
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to overshadow; obscure
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Participles
Conjugated Forms
Present
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adumbratesimple
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adumbratessimple
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have adumbratedperfect
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has adumbratedperfect
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am adumbratingprogressive
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are adumbratingprogressive
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is adumbratingprogressive
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have been adumbratingperfect progressive
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has been adumbratingperfect progressive
Past
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adumbratedsimple
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had adumbratedperfect
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was adumbratingprogressive
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were adumbratingprogressive
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had been adumbratingperfect progressive
Future
Etymology
Origin of adumbrate
First recorded in 1575–85; from Latin adumbrātus “shaded,” past participle of adumbrāre “to shade,” from ad- ad- + umbr(a) “shade, shadow” + -āre, infinitive verb suffix
Explanation
To adumbrate something is to outline it. In an English essay, you could adumbrate the themes in a novel; or, in a letter to Santa, you could adumbrate all the ways you have been behaving. Adumbrate is built on the Latin root umbra, "shade," and the image it evokes is of a shadow being cast around something. Your outline is like a shadow of something bigger — like the themes in that novel or the ways you have been behaving. You can also use adumbrate to mean "foreshadow": "The scene where the princess dreams of the vampire adumbrates her later discovery that her little brother is, in fact, a vampire."
Vocabulary lists containing adumbrate
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
His photographs have used a variety of techniques to adumbrate this world.
From New York Times ● Aug. 10, 2017
Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian But as soon as you adumbrate thus, you are beset with misgivings.
From The Guardian ● Apr. 19, 2016
Together with the bare facts of the retreat at Walden, those lines have become the ones by which we adumbrate Thoreau, so that our image of the man has also become simplified and inspirational.
From The New Yorker ● Oct. 19, 2015
In the midst of Author Beebe's spells, one is continually jerked up by the wish that, on his present trawling trip to Galapagos, he may lose the word "adumbrate" forever overboard.
From Time Magazine Archive
So far as communism of capital is concerned, did not Cleveland's graphic statement adumbrate the conditions as they exist today?
From Proceedings of the Second National Conservation Congress at Saint Paul, September 5-8, 1910 by United States. National Conservation Congress
More than any juice cleanse or lottery win or career switch, a foreign language adumbrates a vision of a parallel life.
From The New Yorker ● Aug. 1, 2016
But they furnish such extensive extracts from diaries and letters, as well as such detailed ''work histories'' of the compositions, that their valuable book adumbrates the shape of many biographies and studies to come.
From Time Magazine Archive
The eyes of education are fixed always upon the future, and philosophy of whatever kind, directly adumbrates a Utopia, thinks on educational lines.
From Cambridge Essays on Education by Various
The figure of the villain, too, adumbrates, though faintly, the type which engaged Hawthorne's mind in later years.
From Nathaniel Hawthorne by George Edward Woodberry
Very many things could be regimented and organized into the mute system of education that Goethe evidently adumbrates there.
From On the Choice of Books by Thomas Carlyle
Passages of the original work underlined and adumbrated with exclamation marks and double or even treble question marks; phrases scored out and notes running down the margin at right angles to the printed text.
From The Guardian ● Apr. 28, 2020
In between, works by contemporaries complicate superficial ideas about his meteoric genius, and small, delicate drawings teem with an abundance of ideas — paintings never made, thoughts adumbrated then abandoned.
From Washington Post ● Oct. 18, 2019
But while lauding the rights and privileges of the Americans he observed, Tocqueville also adumbrated the responsibilities that came with being an American citizen.
From Time ● Nov. 2, 2016
It reflects the fear that the evil adumbrated in the play cannot be contained, cannot be explained even within the structure of tragedy.
From Slate ● Apr. 26, 2013
These final works, these last sonatas and poems and preludes of Scriabine are but the essentialization of the personal traits adumbrated by the compositions of the earlier periods.
From Musical Portraits Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers by Paul Rosenfeld
The filmmakers build to this moment as if it were D-Day or the Rumble in the Jungle, excavating a biographical Before and adumbrating a news media After.
From New York Times ● Jul. 30, 2015
In Wisconsin last week, Nixon gave a paid, 20-minute nationwide radio speech adumbrating a broad and basically moderate approach to the war.
From Time Magazine Archive
In three centuries, already some outline has been sketched, rudely adumbrating the future settlement destined for the planet, some infant castrametation has been marked out for the future encampment of nations.
From Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 by Various
This one’s descent was mincing, hesitant, adumbrating dread of disclosures—these expectedly ample, columnar, massive.
From The So-called Human Race by Bert Leston Taylor
"Ah—well you may ask that!" said Henchard, the new-moon-shaped grin adumbrating itself again upon his mouth.
From The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
