All 5 Uses of
elaborate
in
The Age of Innocence
- The result, of course, was that the young girl who was the centre of this elaborate system of mystification remained the more inscrutable for her very frankness and assurance.†
Chpt 6 *
- In consequence of this search he arrived late at the office, perceived that his doing so made no difference whatever to any one, and was filled with sudden exasperation at the elaborate futility of his life.†
Chpt 14
- In the morning he had a spin in the ice-boat with his hostess and a few of the hardier guests; in the afternoon he "went over the farm" with Reggie, and listened, in the elaborately appointed stables, to long and impressive disquisitions on the horse; after tea he talked in a corner of the firelit hall with a young lady who had professed herself broken-hearted when his engagement was announced, but was now eager to tell him of her own matrimonial hopes; and finally, about midnight, he…†
Chpt 15 *
- To the right and left, the famous weedless lawns studded with "specimen" trees (each of a different variety) rolled away to long ranges of grass crested with elaborate cast-iron ornaments; and below, in a hollow, lay the four-roomed stone house which the first Patroon had built on the land granted him in 1612.†
Chpt 15
- All these amiable and inexorable persons were resolutely engaged in pretending to each other that they had never heard of, suspected, or even conceived possible, the least hint to the contrary; and from this tissue of elaborate mutual dissimulation Archer once more disengaged the fact that New York believed him to be Madame Olenska's lover.†
Chpt 33
Definitions:
-
(elaborate as in: elaborate on your plan) add details or explain in detail
-
(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