adumbrate

Other forms of adumbrate

past tense

adumbrated·

present participle

adumbrating·

third person

adumbrates·

Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.

Questions about adumbrate

What does adumbrate mean?

adumbrate means "describe roughly or briefly or give the main points or summary of". That is the primary sense; the word has 2 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in adumbrate?

adumbrate has 3 syllables and divides as a-dum-brate under the regular spelling rules. It is not in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary, so that comes from how the word is written rather than from a recorded pronunciation, and no stress or phonetic transcription is claimed for it.

What is another word for adumbrate?

Close synonyms include sketch, outline, intimate, insinuate. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is adumbrate a common word?

adumbrate is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.