• Allude

    Pronunciation

    • IPA: /əˈluːd/

    Origin

    From Middle French alluder, from Latin alludere ("to play with or allude"), from ad + ludere ("to play").

    Full definition of allude

    Verb

    1. (intransitive) To refer to something indirectly or by suggestion.
      • 1597, Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Book V, Chapter xxix.3, 1841 ed., page 523:These speeches . . . do seem to allude unto such ministerial garments as were then in use.
      • 1846, George Luxford, Edward Newman, The Phytologist: a popular botanical miscellany: Volume 2, Part 2, page 474It was aptly said by Newton that "whatever is not deduced from facts must be regarded as hypothesis," but hypothesis appears to us a title too honourable for the crude guessings to which we allude.
      • 2012-01, Robert L. Dorit, Rereading Darwin, We live our lives in three dimensions for our threescore and ten allotted years. Yet every branch of contemporary science, from statistics to cosmology, alludes to processes that operate on scales outside of human experience: the millisecond and the nanometer, the eon and the light-year.

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