How to Use explain away in a Sentence

explain away

verb
  • Cramer said Visa tried to explain away a downtick in the last month.
    Matthew J. Belvedere, CNBC, 24 July 2024
  • Of course, quirks of the schedule are not enough to explain away 33 losses in the last 35 games alone.
    Jon Hale, The Courier-Journal, 16 Oct. 2020
  • And so there's a lot of using the vehicle of art to explain away breaking the rules.
    Katrina Kaufman, CBS News, 20 Jan. 2024
  • The loss to South Carolina was too much for the committee to explain away.
    Paul Myerberg, USA TODAY, 22 Nov. 2022
  • Some proved to be frauds or were easily explained away.
    Terrence McCoy, Washington Post, 6 Sep. 2023
  • Through the years, black coaches have heard a host of excuses to explain away the pitiful numbers.
    Jerome Solomon, ExpressNews.com, 27 June 2020
  • Trump has falsely claimed that there was widespread fraud in the election to explain away his defeat.
    BostonGlobe.com, 7 Jan. 2021
  • But that doesn’t fly and neither do the efforts to explain away Biden’s misstatement.
    Michael A. Cohen, The New Republic, 28 Mar. 2022
  • Eleven cyclists have already been killed in 2023 — a number that can’t be explained away by a lack of data sets.
    Curbed, 13 Apr. 2023
  • Starting to wonder if the things that go bump in the night are more than your house’s quirks that can be rationally explained away?
    Rachel Silva, ELLE Decor, 15 June 2023
  • And therefore what else could be happening that can explain away this?
    Mariette Dichristina, Scientific American, 18 June 2018
  • This isn’t a trend that can be explained away by a difference in ambition.
    Liz Elting, Forbes, 28 Mar. 2024
  • All of these were explained away by prosecutors, and again by Judge Drake in his summing-up.
    Heidi Blake, The New Yorker, 29 July 2024
  • So far, Barbi has explained away the questions through magic.
    Justine McDaniel, Washington Post, 22 Dec. 2023
  • Some clues here can be debunked, others could be tough to trust, others are…harder to explain away.
    Paul Tassi, Forbes, 13 Nov. 2021
  • Trump was undeterred in exchanges that are easy to understand and hard to explain away.
    Susan Page, USA TODAY, 17 Aug. 2023
  • But the central bank must not explain away a clear emerging pattern of rising product prices.
    Mickey D. Levy and Michael D. Bordo, WSJ, 26 Apr. 2021
  • Ten Hag is running out of excuses to explain away his team’s failures.
    Graham Ruthven, Forbes, 29 Sep. 2024
  • Few scientists expect that to be the case, but it has been suggested as a means to explain away the existence of dark matter.
    Michael D. Lemonick, Scientific American, 1 Jan. 2024
  • As a growing body of consistent evidence can be hard to explain away, one fallback is to impugn the source.
    Sean B. Carroll, Scientific American, 8 Nov. 2020
  • But his attempts to explain away the allegations could create headaches for his legal team in court.
    Joel Khalili, WIRED, 3 Oct. 2023
  • If anything, the ending of The Flash creates an ideal setup to explain away whatever comes next from DC.
    Christian Holub, EW.com, 17 June 2023
  • Events like those that unfolded in late July can no longer be easily explained away by the Kremlin.
    Christopher Michael Faulkner, The Conversation, 9 Aug. 2024
  • Skeptical, the group spent the next 18 months attempting to explain away their detection.
    Eric Betz, Discover Magazine, 2 Feb. 2021
  • This all ties into the camp factor, which could also be used to explain away hacky details like Samantha’s cat as a stand-in for her spinsterhood.
    Katie Rife, IndieWire, 12 Sep. 2024
  • Under the first of those CEOs, Sears’ market value reached its apex and began to decline, a reversal the top leaders explained away as a quirk of the economy.
    Geoff Colvin, Fortune, 10 Aug. 2024
  • But the cramps in her stomach, the fatigue and depression – all easily explained away – never abated for long.
    David Oliver, USA TODAY, 21 Feb. 2024
  • While some had been speaking out against the abuses at Willowbrook for many years, Rivera’s report depicted the horrors that could not be explained away.
    Ed Martin, Baltimore Sun, 25 Apr. 2024
  • Being stuck in place for eternity in the title of a movie that uses a lazy write-around to explain away that one really handsome guy’s British accent?
    Chris Stanton, Vulture, 23 Sep. 2022
  • The relentless acts of retaliation could be explained away by the twin tragedies at the centre of the story: the rape and murder of a teenage girl, the suicide of a terminally ill cop.
    Hazlitt, 17 May 2023

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'explain away.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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