Noun

(en noun)

The act or process of producing or refining with labor; improvement by successive operations; refinement.

*{{quote-magazine, year=2013, month=September-October, author=(Henry Petroski)

, magazine=(American Scientist), title= The Evolution of Eyeglasses , passage=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,

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; as, the elaboration of food into chyme; the elaboration of chyle, or sap, or tissues.

(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.

(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.

Noun

(en noun)

The act or process of explaining.

The explanation was long and drawn-out.

Something that explains, makes understandable.

An explanation for each UFO sighting was easily found.

(euphemistic) An excuse, apologetic justification not based on enough evidence.

expense.