unfold

unfold 1 Unfold, evolve, develop, elaborate, perfect can all mean to cause something to emerge from a state where its potentialities are not apparent or not realized into a state where they are apparent or fully realized.

Unfold suggests usually a natural process by which is unveiled or disclosed the true character, the real beauty or ugliness, or the significance or insignificance of someone or something

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the bud unfolds itself into the flower

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I see thy beauty gradually unfold, daily and hourly, more and more— Tennyson

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they were theater people, and the unfolding of a new creative work was a solemnity— Wouk

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Evolve implies an unfolding or unrolling itself gradually and in orderly process; the term is particularly applicable when the slowness of the process and the complications involved in it are to be suggested

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the Protozoa . . . evolved the types that were transitional to higher animals— Miner

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societies jre evolved in structure and function as in growth— Spencer

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life has evolved according to a Creator's plan— Marquand

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However evolve is often used with weakened emphasis on the implications of slowness and complexity to imply specifically the production of a result (as an idea, a theory, or an aesthetic effect) from within or as if from within

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twilight combined with the scenery of Egdon Heath to evolve a thing majestic without severity, impressive without showiness— Hardy

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this novel and intensely exacting technique, evolved ... by the critical genius of a few . . . Frenchmen and of Henry James— Montague

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Develop (see also MATURE) implies a passing through several stages and stresses the coming out or unfolding of latent possibilities in a thing, whether by a natural process or through human means (compare DEVELOPMENT)

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there were different ideas of how the paper should develop. They wanted it to be successful; I wanted it to be outrageous— Mailer

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shorter than His wife—a jolly pink-faced man with a quietness that might have been developed to complement the noise she made— Cheever

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most of the great European thinkers of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries . . . helped to develop the conception Shaftesbury first formulated— Ellis

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Elaborate distinctively stresses attention to detail and increasing complication by means of which the latent possibilities of a thing are more fully or completely developed

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the sun, under whose influence one plant elaborates nutriment for man and another poison— Southey

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the constitutional system which was in course of being gradually elaborated— Gladstone

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the Negro discovered and elaborated a morality ... an ethical differentiation between the good and the bad in every human activity— Mailer

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Perfect stresses a freeing from faults, defects, or blemishes, and it can additionally imply an unfolding or development of something so that it stands as a complete or finished product

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she had cultivated and perfected a vast cowlike calm which served her now in good stead— Pynchon

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he first conceives, then perfects his design, as a mere instrument in hands divine— Cowper

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a new determination to complete and perfect his plant-setting machine had taken possession of him— Anderson

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Analogous words: *show, manifest, evidence, evince, demonstrate: exhibit, display, expose (see SHOW)

2 *solve, resolve, unravel, decipher