- 1
To adumbrate something is to suggest it, or describe it, but only in outline — not fully, not with all the details filled in. You might adumbrate a plan in a short speech, or a writer might adumbrate an idea before explaining it properly. The picture behind the word is a shadow: you see the shape, not the thing itself. It is a very formal, verb. Almost nobody says it in ordinary conversation; even many fluent speakers have never used it. You will meet it, if at all, in academic writing or older prose.
約略陳述；勾勒出輪廓（極書面，口語幾乎不用）
組成Borrowed from Latin adumbrātus (“shown in outline”), from adumbrāre (“to cast a shadow on”), from umbra (“shadow”), with ad- (“toward / upon”).
同家族的字
- umbrathe same Latin piece meaning shadow; in English, the darkest part of a shadow
- umbrellabuilt from the same shadow / shade piece
- adumbrationthe noun from this verb
原始詞典資料3 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，原文照列，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
adumbrateverb/ˈædʌmˌbɹeɪt/
- 1
To foreshadow vaguely.
- From track level, its operating floor looks particularly capacious, but there is a vacant space at one end which was designed to accommodate the control panel for the Perth-Inverness C.T.C. scheme; this was adumbrated as long ago as the 1955 Modernisation Plan, but now seems to be regarded as an unjustifiable luxury.
- This piece will perform a micro-excavation of these toplayers of the literary soil to suggest anxiogenic literature has the potential not only to adumbrate the post-apocalypse, a common theme in contemporary literature, but also to anticipate the post-Anthropocene.
- 2
To give a vague outline.
- Accordingly, even though readers always and understandably speak of the theories adumbrated by Socrates here as "Plato's theories", one ought not to speak of them so without some compunction--the writing itself, and also Plato the author, present these always in a spirit of open-ended exploration, and sometimes there are contextual clues indicating that Socrates exaggerates or goes what the argument truly justifies, and so on.
- 3
To obscure or overshadow.
資料來源：英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary（CC BY-SA 4.0）。 原文照列，未經改寫。