par·a·phrase

(păr′ə-frāz′)

1. A restatement of a text or passage in another form or other words, often to clarify meaning.

2. The restatement of texts in other words as a studying or teaching device.

3. The adaptation or alteration of a text or quotation to serve a different purpose from that of the original.

v. par·a·phrased, par·a·phras·ing, par·a·phras·es

v.tr.

1. To restate using different words, especially to clarify.

2. To adapt or alter (a text or quotation) to serve a different purpose from that of the original: "It's tempting to paraphrase an environmental slogan and say, 'Think globally, pray locally'" (Christian Science Monitor).

v.intr.

To compose a paraphrase.

[French, from Latin paraphrasis, from Greek, from paraphrazein, to paraphrase : para-, alongside; see para-¹ + phrazein, to show, explain; see g^whren- in Indo-European roots.]

par′a·phras′a·ble adj.

par′a·phras′er n.

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

paraphrasable

(ˈpærəˌfreɪzəbəl)

adj

capable of being paraphrased

Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged, 12th Edition 2014 © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2014

References in periodicals archive

of options for encoding the paraphrasable content of a writing."

A quantitative analysis of writing style on the U.S. Supreme Court

For too many of us the default setting is to think and say that the mass consisting of formal patterns is the shadow and servant of the mass consisting of the paraphrasable gist.

On Middlebrow Formalism, or the Fallacy of Imitative Form Revisited

What is being protected is more than a secret human love affair; it is also a love affair with language, with a poetic process that is unwilling to reduce poems to paraphrasable meanings and simultaneously to consumable products.

Unfathomable poetics: queer interpersonality in the New York school

Readers who take comfort in paraphrasable sense may prefer part 2, but those more drawn to experiment will find the daring, imaginative flights more appealing.

Kerry Shawn Keys. Night Flight

The result is that the fact of verse seems insisted on with a blinding purity, stripped to the maximum degree possible of any superstitious analogy whatever with the paraphrasable content (which does not need paraphrase).

Ten asteroids for Sphere

Since I'm a viewer with a bias toward finding paraphrasable meaning, this puts me in a position that reminds me of that of the suitor in a famous passage from Sartre's Being and Nothingness, As you may recall, the fellow doesn't know whether the girl means to accept or resist his advances--and neither does she.

Ann Pibal: MEULENSTEEN

But writers like David Lodge (1966:19) and Bassnett (1980) argued convincingly, that novels are non paraphrasable.

A Prologue to the Theory of Translation and Its Practical Implications