elaboration

From Middle French élaboration. Morphologically elaborate +‎ -ion

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• Rhymes: -eɪʃən

elaboration (countable and uncountable, plural elaborations)

1. The act or process of producing or refining with labor; improvement by successive operations; refinement.
   • 2013 September-October, Henry Petroski, “The Evolution of Eyeglasses”, in American Scientist:

     Digging deeper, the invention of eyeglasses is an elaboration of the more fundamental development of optics technology. The ability of a segment of a glass sphere to magnify whatever is placed before it was known around the year 1000, when the spherical segment was called a reading stone, […] .

2. The natural process of formation or assimilation, performed by the living organs in animals and vegetables, by which a crude substance is changed into something of a higher order

   the elaboration of food into chyme

   the elaboration of chyle, or sap, or tissues

3. (computing) Setting up a hierarchy of calculated constants in a language such as Ada so that the values of one or more of them determine others further down in the hierarchy.
4. (electronics) The process of taking a parsed tree of an abstract integrated circuit definition in a language such as Verilog and creating a hierarchy of module instances that ends with primitive (atomic) gates and statements.
5. (psychology) The level of processing of a message or argument.^[1]