divulge

UK/daɪˈvʌld͡ʒ/US/daɪˈvʌld͡ʒ/

verbC1Common in everyday speech and writing · #7,489 of 15,258neutral

Other forms: divulged, divulges, divulging

To divulge is to reveal information that was private. Divulge the details, refuse to divulge, divulge a secret.

It is formal and belongs to statements, court reports and contracts — will not divulge any confidential information. Refuse to divulge is the fixed phrase for declining to say. It is stronger than tell and narrower than reveal, since what is divulged was meant to be kept. Note that the word means literally to make known to the common people, from Latin vulgus, the crowd.

Definitions of divulge

1verbdivulgeTo reveal information that was private.C1
“The journalist refused to divulge the name of her source.”

divulge is a revealing.

Where it comes from

Latin divulgare is di-, widely, plus vulgus, the common people. Vulgar and divulge come from the same crowd, so to divulge is to put something about among everybody.

Latin
dīvulgō
Middle English
divulgen
English, today
divulge

Built from

dī- · Latin — widely
vulgō · Latin — to make known, announce; to publish

Middle English divulgen, from Latin dīvulgō + -en, from dī- (“widely”) + vulgō (“to make known, announce; to publish”).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Sharper Verbs

Practise this word

divulge in the wild

In the context of information security, social engineering is the use of psychological pressure to influence people to perform actions or divulge confidential information.
Social engineering (security)
Jim Taricani was an American reporter, who served a sentence of six months of home confinement for refusing a court order to divulge a source.
Jim Taricani
The story focuses on the Baltimore police struggling to persuade witnesses to divulge details of the Barksdale gang's drug dealing.
Old Cases
The Curse of the Colonel has also been used as a bogeyman threat to those who would divulge the KFC recipe.
Curse of the Colonel
According to the players, they refused to divulge more-strategic material, such as team tactics and player selection policies.
John the bookmaker controversy

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

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