Other forms: implies, implied, implying
To imply something is to get the meaning across without ever putting it into words. You ask how the interview went and your friend says the room was very warm — she has implied that it went badly, and you both know it.
The trap is imply and infer, and it catches everyone: the speaker implies, the listener infers. Say "are you inferring that I lied?" and you have the two the wrong way round. Imply takes a that-clause and turns up most in accusations — are you implying I made this up? Away from arguments it does quieter work, because a fact can imply another fact: a sudden fall in sales implies a problem somewhere, and in logic one statement implies a second when the second has to be true whenever the first is. The noun is implication, the adjective implicit.
1verbimplyTo let a further meaning be understood without stating it.~60%
“He never said I was lazy; he implied it and left it there.”
2verbindicateOf a fact or a situation: to mean that something else must also be true.~38%
“A smaller class implies more attention for each child.”
synonyms: indicate, point to
3verbmathsIn logic and maths: to guarantee that a second statement is true whenever the first is.~2%
“If p implies q, then q holds every time p does.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 131 sentences found in the wild and placed 131 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Also accepted in games: hint
imPLY → a FLY
A fly is walking slowly across the birthday cake. Nobody says a word about the cake. Your friend catches your eye, looks at the fly, then looks back at you, and you know exactly what she means.
hooks ontofly
Latin plico meant to fold, and implico was to fold in. What you imply is folded inside what you actually said, waiting for somebody to open it out. The same fold shows up in two English words that came the same way: employ and implicate.
Latin
implico — to infold, involve
Old French
emplier
Middle English
implien
English, today
imply
Built from
From Middle English implien, emplien, borrowed from Old French emplier, from Latin implico (“to infold, involve”), from in (“in”) + plico (“to fold”). a doublet of employ and implicate.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA