implicitly

English

Etymology

Etymology tree

English implicit

Proto-Indo-European *leyg-der.

Proto-Germanic *līkąder.

Proto-Germanic *-līkaz

Proto-Germanic *-ê

Proto-Germanic *-līkê

Proto-West Germanic *-līkē

Old English -līċe

Middle English -ly

English -ly

English implicitly

From implicit + -ly.

Pronunciation

• Audio (Mid-Atlantic US):

  (file)

Adverb

implicitly (comparative more implicitly, superlative most implicitly)

1. In an implicit or implied manner.

   tell someone implicitly

   He was punished for asking for answers implicitly during the exam.

   • 2025, Edward A. F. Gibson, “Dependency Grammar” (chapter 3), in Syntax: A Cognitive Approach, MIT Press, →DOI, →ISBN, page 57:

     I will sometimes omit the features that need to agree on the arcs, just to keep the diagrams simpler. I will also often omit many features of the head categories, such as count, mass, name, and number agreement features, again for simplicity of presentation. But keep in mind that all these agreement features are implicitly there.

2. Without doubting or questioning.

Antonyms

• explicitly

Translations

in an implicit or implied manner

• Catalan: implícitament (ca)
• Finnish: epäsuorasti (fi) (implicitly, indirectly), ehdottomasti (fi) (implicitly, without question), välillisesti (implicitly, indirectly), implisiittisesti (fi)
• French: implicitement (fr)
• Galician: implicitamente
• Greek: έμμεσα (el) (émmesa), σιωπηρά (el) (siopirá)
• Italian: implicitamente (it)
• Polish: bezwarunkowo (pl)
• Portuguese: implicitamente
• Russian: неявно (ru) (nejavno)
• Spanish: implícitamente (es)
• Ukrainian: неявно (nejavno), непрямо (neprjamo)

without doubting or questioning

• Russian: беспрекосло́вно (ru) (besprekoslóvno), безогово́рочно (ru) (bezogovóročno)
• Ukrainian: цілковито (uk) (cilkovyto), беззастережно (uk) (bezzasterežno)