Explicit (from Latin explicare, "to unfold" and thus also make visible) can mean:
- Sexually explicit, content that might be deemed offensive or graphic
- Detailed, clear
- the final words of a text, which are immediately followed by a colophon (publishing)
- Explicit method call, a method (computer programming) call which requires the object to be of a specific class
- Implicit method, approach used in numerical analysis for obtaining numerical solutions of time-dependent ordinary and partial differential equations
- Explicit memory is content of a person's mind that they can access consciously (e.g. the name of the capital of France). Some content or memories may instead be implicit, or 'unconscious' (e.g. the memories of how exactly to ride a bike - because people may not realize they perform certain actions when they ride their bike).
Famous quotes containing the word explicit:
“... the Ovarian Theory of Literature, or, rather, its complement, the Testicular Theory. A recent camp follower ... of this explicit theory is ... Norman Mailer, who has attributed his own gift, and the literary gift in general, solely and directly to the possession of a specific pair of organs. One writes with these organs, Mailer has said ... and I have always wondered with what shade of ink he manages to do it.”
—Cynthia Ozick (b. 1928)
“I think “taste” is a social concept and not an artistic one. I’m willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else’s living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another’s brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves.”
—John Updike (b. 1932)
“Like dreaming, reading performs the prodigious task of carrying us off to other worlds. But reading is not dreaming because books, unlike dreams, are subject to our will: they envelop us in alternative realities only because we give them explicit permission to do so. Books are the dreams we would most like to have, and, like dreams, they have the power to change consciousness, turning sadness to laughter and anxious introspection to the relaxed contemplation of some other time and place.”
—Victor Null, South African educator, psychologist. Lost in a Book: The Psychology of Reading for Pleasure, introduction, Yale University Press (1988)