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We won't lead you astray over the history of adduce; it is one of a plethora of familiar words that trace to the Latin root dūcere, which means "to lead." Perhaps we can induce you to deduce a few other dūcere offspring if we offer a few hints about them. One is a synonym of kidnap, one's a title for a British royal, and one's another word for decrease. There are your leads; here are the answers. They are abduct, duke, and reduce, respectively. There are also many others, including induce, which means "to persuade" or "to bring about."
Examples of adduce in a Sentence
Longreads, 20 July 2023
The term could justify both exclusion and engagement: the scourge of heathenism was later adduced as a reason to oppose Chinese immigration to California, and to support the annexation of the Hawaiian Islands.
—Kelefa Sanneh, The New Yorker, 27 Mar. 2023
Examples are not difficult to adduce.
—Joseph Epstein, National Review, 17 Sep. 2020
Last month in Nature Reviews Genetics there was a paper, Measuring selection in contemporary human populations, which reviewed data from various surveys in an attempt to adduce the current trajectory of human evolution.
—Razib Khan, Discover Magazine, 11 Oct. 2010
Distinct and less numerous groups, such as Sardinians, may show less ancestral cosmopolitanism in part because the reference populations which could be used to adduce such a state no longer exist.
—Razib Khan, Discover Magazine, 9 Mar. 2012
But they are nicely spanned by classical genetic techniques such as linkage mapping which can adduce regions of the genome of possible interesting in controlling variations in the phenotype.
—Razib Khan, Discover Magazine, 7 June 2011
Buckingham woos her with sundry twinkling guitar parts that adduce his intuition about what love songs require: crosstalk, tension, release.
—Alfred Soto, Billboard, 1 Dec. 2022
No one was ever charged, no motive adduced, and Wong’s wife, Leena, who discovered the body and might have known more, is now dead of cancer.
—Jesse Green, New York Times, 24 Feb. 2020
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These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'adduce.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.
Word History
Middle English adducen, borrowed from Anglo-French & Latin; Anglo-French aducer, borrowed from Latin addūcere "to lead or bring (a person or an animal to a place), introduce, bring forward," from ad- ad- + dūcere "to lead" — more at tow entry 1
15th century, in the meaning defined above
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Cite this Entry
“Adduce.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/adduce. Accessed 27 Sep. 2023.
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More from Merriam-Webster on adduce
Nglish: Translation of adduce for Spanish Speakers
Britannica English: Translation of adduce for Arabic Speakers
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