Extricate

 WORD OF THE DAY

extricate / verb / EK-struh-kayt

Definition

1: to free or remove from an entanglement or difficulty

2a: to distinguish from a related thing

2b (archaic): unravel

Examples

"The skylight has been lifted off Toland Hall to create an opening large enough to extricate the panels by crane." — Sam Whiting, The San Francisco Chronicle, 31 Aug. 2021

The local government, recognizing the number of local children drawn into smuggling, has launched a program to extricate them from the business.

— Kevin Sieff, Washington Post, 2 Oct. 2021

 

Did You Know?

It can take an ample amount of dexterity - manual, verbal, or mental - to free yourself from a tangled situation. This can be seen in extricate, a word derived from Latin extricatus, which combines the prefix ex- ("out of") with the noun tricae, meaning "trifles or perplexities." (The resemblance of tricae to our word trick is no illusion; it’s an ancestor.) While a number of words (such as "disentangle") share with extricate the meaning of "to free from difficulty," extricate suggests the act of doing so with care and ingenuity, as in "Through months of careful budgeting, he was able to extricate himself from his financial burdens."