How to Use explain away in a Sentence

explain away

verb
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • Skeptical, the group spent the next 18 months attempting to explain away their detection.
    Eric Betz, Discover Magazine, 2 Feb. 2021
  • 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
  • The development, however ominous, felt distant, easy to explain away, a life-or-death problem for other parts of the world.
    Nathan Fenno, Los Angeles Times, 23 Dec. 2020
  • There are plenty of videos of potential UAP encounters that the Pentagon can’t explain away.
    Tim Burchett, National Review, 27 May 2022
  • Gun store owners offered the ATF a litany of excuses to explain away violations.
    USA Today, 27 May 2021
  • And, if properly handled, this revelation could have gone a long way toward explaining away some of those flaws in the writing.
    Stuart Miller, Los Angeles Times, 9 Feb. 2024
  • At the same time, police stress most people who own firearms handle them properly, and a single reason cannot explain away every shooting.
    Sarah Nelson, The Indianapolis Star, 18 Jan. 2024
  • Paul Washington, a captain at a firehouse in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, said firefighters often tried to explain away their misdeeds.
    New York Times, 1 Oct. 2021
  • Surgical scars were explained away as botched bikini waxes.
    Shane O’Neill, New York Times, 30 May 2023
  • Kevin Rogers, then-chief operating officer, responded at the meeting that the data could not be explained away.
    Talia Richman, Dallas News, 10 Aug. 2023
  • Soon enough, the show is also working to explain away pretty much everything else about her behavior in France, from the romantic to the professional.
    Megan Garber, The Atlantic, 3 Dec. 2020
  • Amy Goh, a contortionist and author of the Bendy Diaries blog, is eager to dispel the myth that her ability can be explained away as an inborn quality.
    Cody Cottier, Discover Magazine, 20 Feb. 2024

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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