adumbrate

Definition

To foreshadow vaguely.

Etymology

Borrowed from Latin adumbrātus (“represented in outline”), from adumbrāre (“cast a shadow on”), from umbra (“shadow”).

Example Sentences

• "From track level, its operating floor looks particularly capacious, but there is a vacant space at one end which was designed to accommodate the control panel for the Perth-Inverness C.T.C. scheme; this was adumbrated as long ago as the 1955 Modernisation Plan, but now seems to be regarded as an unjustifiable luxury."
• "This piece will perform a micro-excavation of these toplayers of the literary soil to suggest anxiogenic literature has the potential not only to adumbrate the post-apocalypse, a common theme in contemporary literature, but also to anticipate the post-Anthropocene."
• "Accordingly, even though readers always and understandably speak of the theories adumbrated by Socrates here as "Plato's theories", one ought not to speak of them so without some compunction--the writing itself, and also Plato the author, present these always in a spirit of open-ended exploration, and sometimes there are contextual clues indicating that Socrates exaggerates or goes what the argument truly justifies, and so on."