All 7 Uses of
elaborate
in
The Scarlet Letter
- On the breast of her gown, in fine red cloth, surrounded with an elaborate embroidery and fantastic flourishes of gold thread, appeared the letter A. It was ... of a splendour in accordance with the taste of the age, but greatly beyond what was allowed by the sumptuary regulations of the colony.
Chpt 2 (definition 1) *elaborate = ornate (intricate or complex)
- Yet the taste of the age, demanding whatever was elaborate in compositions of this kind, did not fail to extend its influence over our stern progenitors, who had cast behind them so many fashions which it might seem harder to dispense with.
Chpt 5 (definition 1)
- The furniture of the hall consisted of some ponderous chairs, the backs of which were elaborately carved with wreaths of oaken flowers; and likewise a table in the same taste, the whole being of the Elizabethan age, or perhaps earlier, and heirlooms, transferred hither from the Governor's paternal home.
Chpt 7 (definition 1)elaborately = ornately (with intricate or complex detail)
- The wide circumference of an elaborate ruff, beneath his grey beard, in the antiquated fashion of King James's reign, caused his head to look not a little like that of John the Baptist in a charger.
Chpt 8 (definition 1)elaborate = complex
- He soon manifested his familiarity with the ponderous and imposing machinery of antique physic; in which every remedy contained a multitude of far-fetched and heterogeneous ingredients, as elaborately compounded as if the proposed result had been the Elixir of Life.
Chpt 9 (definition 1)elaborately = complexly
- In his Indian captivity, moreover, he had gained much knowledge of the properties of native herbs and roots; nor did he conceal from his patients that these simple medicines, Nature's boon to the untutored savage, had quite as large a share of his own confidence as the European Pharmacopoeia, which so many learned doctors had spent centuries in elaborating.
Chpt 9 (definition 2) *elaborating = adding detail
- There were others again, true saintly fathers, whose faculties had been elaborated by weary toil among their books, and by patient thought, and etherealised, moreover, by spiritual communications with the better world, into which their purity of life had almost introduced these holy personages, with their garments of mortality still clinging to them.
Chpt 11 (definition 2)elaborated = increased (by adding more detail)
Definitions:
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(1) (elaborate as in: an elaborate design) having details and complexity -- sometimes fancy or ornateeditor's notes: Depending upon it's context, this sense of elaborate can additionally imply that details make something either:
- more special than others of its kind in a good way
- more complicated than necessary in a bad way
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(2) (elaborate as in: elaborate on your plan) add details or explain in detail