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Definition of "illation" [il•la•tion]

  • The act of inferring or drawing conclusions. (noun)
  • A conclusion drawn; a deduction. Also called illative. (noun)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Use "illation" in a sentence
  • "While it would appear that boys and girls followed a common curriculum, there was gender differentiation: Girls received instruction in sewing and needlework and boys in cantillation of Torah and haftarah."
  • "For it hath to do both in knowledge and opinion, and is necessary and assisting to all our other intellectual faculties, and indeed contains two of them, viz. sagacity and illation."
  • "There is an important sense, however, in which the epithet "material" has been applied to reasoning, to denote illation in which the relational formality has not yet been dissected out."