Other forms: implications
An implication is what a sentence says without saying it. Tell your friend that some of the team worked hard, and the implication is that some of them did not — nobody wrote it down, and there it is.
In the plural it does a different job: the implications of a decision are the things that follow from it, the knock-on effects nobody costed. The implications for staff. The financial implications. It also names being caught up in something bad — his implication in the fraud cost him the job. Keep implication and inference apart: the speaker implies and the listener infers, so the implication sits in what was said and the inference in what you took away.
1nounsuggestionSomething suggested without being said outright.~47%
“The implication was that we had been lying all along.”
synonyms: suggestion, hint
2nounimplicationA result or effect that follows from something. Mostly used in the plural.~30%
“Nobody had thought through the implications for older staff.”
synonyms: consequence
3nounfactThe fact of being shown to be mixed up in a crime or a scandal.~6%
“She denied any implication in the theft.”
4nounlogicIn logic, the link between a statement and whatever must be true if it holds.~17%
“Implication is written with an arrow: if A, then B.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 103 sentences found in the wild and placed 100 of them on a sense (3 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
impLICation → a LICK
You come home to the cake plate on the floor, licked shining clean, and the dog sitting very straight in the corner with crumbs on its chin. Nobody has told you anything.
hooks ontolick
Behind it is Latin plicō, to fold, and implicō, to fold in, to entangle. An implication is folded into what was said, and you have to open the sentence out to find it. The same fold sits inside imply and implicate — and, further round, inside employ.
Latin
implicātiō
Middle French
implication
English, today
implication
From Middle French implication, from Latin implicātiō. From Middle French implication, from Latin implicationem (accusative of implicatio). Equivalent to implicate + -ion.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA