allude

Etymology

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

verb

  1. (intransitive) To refer to something indirectly or by suggestion.
    These speeches . . . do seem to allude unto such ministerial garments as were then in use. 1597, Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Book V, Chapter xxix.3, 1841 ed., page 523
    It 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. 1846, George Luxford, Edward Newman, The Phytologist: a popular botanical miscellany: Volume 2, Part 2, page 474
    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. 2012-01, Robert L. Dorit, “Rereading Darwin”, in American Scientist, volume 100, number 1, archived from the original on 2012-11-14, page 23

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