Skip to content
ARCHIEENGLISH
LearnPlayWordsRanking
  • Learn
  • Play
  • Words
  • Ranking
  • Mine
← Vocabulary

implicate

UK/ˈɪmplɪkeɪt/US/ˈɪmplɪkeɪt/
verbC1Common in everyday speech and writing · #7,979 of 15,258neutral

Other forms: implicated, implicating, implicates

To implicate is to show that somebody had a part in wrongdoing. Implicate his colleagues, implicated in the fraud, evidence that implicates him.

It stops short of proving guilt: to be implicated is to be connected, and it is the careful word a report uses before anything is decided. In logic, to implicate is to imply, and an implication is what follows from a statement.

Definitions of implicate

  1. 1verbimplicateTo show that somebody had a part in wrongdoing.C1

    “The stolen phone found in his car implicated him in the robbery.”

implicate is a connecting.

Where it comes from

Latin implicare means to entangle — in plus plicare, to fold. Employ and imply are relatives.

  1. Proto-Indo-European

    *pleḱ-

  2. Latin

    implicātus

  3. Middle English

    implicaten

  4. English, today

    implicate

Built from

  • implicō · Latin — to entangle, involve
  • plicō · Latin — to fold

First attested in the 15th century, in Middle English; Middle English implicaten poorly attested, from implicat(e) + -en, borrowed from Latin implicātus, perfect passive participle of implicō (“to entangle, involve”) (see -ate), from plicō (“to fold”). a doublet of imply and employ.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

implicate in the wild

  • To complement it, he developed a mathematical and physical theory of "implicate" and "explicate" order.

    David Bohm

  • However, the term can also implicate research done in fields as varied as the social sciences, the humanities, mathematics, engineering and medicine.

    Open research

  • English officials and diplomats sought to implicate the Duke of Albany in his death as part of their strategy for having him removed from the regency.

    Alexander Stewart, Duke of Ross

  • The decision held that coordination of federal officials with state officials did not implicate the double jeopardy Clause of the Fifth Amendment to the U.S.

    Bartkus v. Illinois

  • The Islamabad High Court, in its detailed judgement on 5 April 2023, pronounced that not enough documentary evidence existed to implicate Imran Khan in the case.

    PTI foreign funding case

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.

Related words

the plicō family

simple

implicate — used about once every 3,040 pages · #7,979 · point at the bar for the others

  • implication