illuminates

illuminate

—vb
1.	(tr) to throw light in or into; light up: to illuminate a room
2.	(tr) to make easily understood; clarify
3.	to adorn, decorate, or be decorated with lights
4.	(tr) to decorate (a letter, page, etc) by the application of colours, gold, or silver
5.	(intr) to become lighted up

—*adj*
6.	archaic made clear or bright with light; illuminated

—n
7.	a person who has or claims to have special enlightenment

[C16: from Latin illūmināre to light up, from lūmen light]

il'luminative

—*adj*

il'luminator

—n

Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 10th Edition
2009 © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins
Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009
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Example sentences

And a new paper illuminates what sets them apart from those disadvantaged

students who do not.

The match strikes the flint and the flame illuminates the face.

Cloud-to-cloud lightning illuminates the silhouette of a giraffe and trees.

The book illuminates the lives of the two pioneers who were both determined to

prove that methods of inoculation could work.

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Matching Quote

"Homer sweeps us away by the irresistible movement of lines through a whole passage to a splendid climax. What counts is the singleness of his effect, the unbroken maintenance of a heroic or tragic mood, the concentration on some action vividly imagined and clearly portrayed without irrelevance or second thoughts or even those hints that lure into bypaths of fancy and suggest that there is more in the words than is obvious at first sight. But in Virgil, great though the paragraphs are, compelling though the climax is when it is reached, we are more concerned with the details, with each small effect and each deftly placed word, than with the whole. We linger over the richness of single phrases, over the "pathetic half-lines," over the precision or potency with which a word illuminates a sentence or a happy sequence of sounds imparts an inexplicable charm to something that might otherwise have been trivial. Of course, Homer has his magical phrases and Virgil his bold effects, but the distinction stands. It is a matter of composition, of art, and it marks the real difference between the two kinds of epic, which are not so much "authentic" and "literary" as oral and written."

-C.M. Bowra

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