imply

From Middle English implien, emplien, borrowed from Old French emplier, from Latin implicare (“to infold, involve”), from in (“in”) + plicare (“to fold”). Doublet of employ and implicate.

• (General American, Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /ɪmˈplaɪ/

• Audio (US):

  (file)

• Rhymes: -aɪ
• Hyphenation: im‧ply

imply (third-person singular simple present implies, present participle implying, simple past and past participle implied)

1. (transitive, of a proposition) to have as a necessary consequence; to lead to (something) as a consequence

   Correlation does not imply causation

   The proposition that "all dogs are mammals" implies that my dog is a mammal.

   • 2016, Grigoriy Blekherman, Daniel Plaumann, Rainer Sinn, Cynthia Vinzant, “Low-Rank Sum-of-Squares Representations on Varieties of Minimal Degree”, in arXiv‎^[1]:

     Our upper bound is the best possible, and it implies the existence of low-rank factorizations of positive semidefinite bivariate matrix polynomials and representations of biforms as sums of few squares.

2. (transitive, of a person) to suggest by logical inference

   When I state that your dog is brown, I am not implying that all dogs are brown.

3. (transitive, of a person or proposition) to hint; to insinuate; to suggest tacitly and avoid a direct statement

   What do you mean "we need to be more careful with hygiene"? Are you implying that I don't wash my hands?

   • 2013, Margaret Helen Hobbs, Carla Rice, Gender and Women's Studies in Canada: Critical Terrain, →ISBN, page 13:

     The wrongminded notion of the feminist movement which implied it was anti-male carried with it the wrongminded assumption that all female space would necessarily be an environment where patriarchy and sexist thinking would be absent.

   • 2019, Margaret Laurence, The Diviners:

     Naturally, the river wasn't wrinkled or creased at all— wrong words, implying something unfluid like skin, something unenduring, prey to age.

   • 2022, R. F. Kuang, Babel, HarperVoyager, page 470:

     Both French and English had once used parcel to refer to pieces of land that made up an estate, but when it evolved to imply an item of business in both, it retained its connotations of small fragmentariness in French, whereas in English it simply meant a package.

4. (archaic) to enfold, entangle.
   • 1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book I, Canto IV”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC:

     And in his bosome secretly there lay / An hatefull Snake, the which his taile vptyes / In many folds, and mortall sting implyes.

• This is a catenative verb that takes the gerund (-ing). See Appendix:English catenative verbs

• (to have as a necessary consequence): entail, implicate, import,
• (to suggest tacitly): allude, hint, insinuate, suggest, (proscribed) infer

• “imply”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.
• William Dwight Whitney, Benjamin E[li] Smith, editors (1911), “imply”, in The Century Dictionary […], New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., →OCLC.