tease out

verb

teased out; teasing out; teases out

transitive verb

1

: to obtain by or as if by disentangling or freeing with a pointed instrument

2

: unravel sense 2

Example Sentences

Recent Examples on the Web

The reasons are hard to tease out. —Sarah Mervosh, New York Times, 15 Oct. 2022

Tufts University president Tony Monaco believes the distinction is not easy to tease out. —Globe Staff, BostonGlobe.com, 14 May 2022

The resulting interaction is both utterly fascinating and, just as often, surprising in the humanistic warmth that the series is able to tease out. —Vulture, 10 Mar. 2022

These include populations with differing rice consumption patterns relative to their total caloric intake and widely varying amounts of arsenic in water used to cook rice, which makes the risk from rice itself difficult to tease out. —Cynthia Sass, Mph, Health.com, 20 Oct. 2021

These elements have been hard to disentangle in the air above land because the rough topography, changing land use, and varying heat create a complex set of variables that are hard to tease out. —Nikk Ogasa, Science | AAAS, 25 May 2021

This study is far from the first time that this idea of hotter weather juicing home run stats has been proposed, but an ever-growing wealth of data in modern baseball and an increasingly robust set of statistical methods for teasing out the impacts of climate change are now available. —Alex Fox, Smithsonian Magazine, 7 Apr. 2023

While teasing out causation in presidential politics is tricky, Reagan’s apostasy wounded Ford. —Walter Shapiro, The New Republic, 3 Apr. 2023

Cronin’s screenplay is light on character development, but there’s a deep interest — in the tradition of Rosemary’s Baby or the more recent Huesera — in teasing out the terrors of motherhood. —Lovia Gyarkye, The Hollywood Reporter, 17 Mar. 2023

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Word History

First Known Use

1828, in the meaning defined at sense 1