from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
- n. Additional explanation or explanatory material.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
- n. An additional explanation or explanatory material.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English
- n. A full or additional explanation; exegesis.
from The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. Subjoined explanation or elucidation; specifically, in rhetoric, the act of subjoining a word, phrase, clause, or passage in order to explain more fully the meaning of an indefinite or obscure expression; the immediate restatement of an idea in a clearer or fuller form.
Here is an instance where the waw with a perfect merely expresses "a digression or an epexegesis," as
No one has put together, or, to adopt a more expressive phrase, heaped together such enormous paragraphs; no one has linked clause on clause, parenthesis on parenthesis, epexegesis on exegesis, in such a bewildering concatenation of inextricable entanglement.
This conclusion is very much strengthened by the epexegesis, "as if they burned in a furnace;" words of explanation immediately added by St. John, as probably knowing the difficulty which his readers would find in this unusual term.