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The ancient Romans knew how to keep the interior of their villas dry when it rained. They covered their roofs with overlapping curved tiles so the "imber" (Latin for pelting rain or "rain shower") couldn't seep in. The tiles were, in effect, "rain tiles," so the Romans called them "imbrices" (singular "imbrex"). The verb for installing the tiles was "imbricare," and English speakers used its past participle - "imbricatus" - to create "imbricate," which was first used as adjective meaning "overlapping (like roof tiles)" and later became a verb meaning "to overlap."
Examples of imbricate in a Sentence
Naomi Oreskes, Scientific American, 1 Sep. 2020
But in reality, the poet’s life is also her work, or the two are imbricated in a frightening way.
—Lauren Kane, The New York Review of Books, 26 Aug. 2023
This prediction rested on two main observations: first, that the military shared strong ideological and social bonds with ZANU-PF party elites dating back to Zimbabwe’s liberation war; and second, that many military leaders were themselves deeply imbricated in ZANU-PF’s powerful patronage system.
—Philip Martin, Foreign Affairs, 17 Nov. 2017
What matters, the novel reassures us, is constantly imbricated with the everyday, just as alienation and tender care can coexist in the same moment.
—Matthew Gavin Frank, Harper's Magazine, 21 Feb. 2022
Virtuosity’s sentence-making is thickened, intricate, imbricated, often dazzling.
—Cynthia Ozick, New York Times, 14 May 2018
But in re-writing those real events, embedding a creative vision of the past in a contemporary fiction, novelists reveal how history is continually imbricated into the texture of our world.
—Josephine Livingstone, New Republic, 31 May 2017
Cite this Entry
“Imbricate.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/imbricate. Accessed 4 May. 2025.
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