How to Use explain away in a Sentence

explain away

verb

• This winter, Irvin didn’t sulk or explain away his underwhelming campaign.
  — Jacob Calvin Meyer, Baltimore Sun, 27 Feb. 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
• 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
• 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
• Skeptical, the group spent the next 18 months attempting to explain away their detection.
  — Eric Betz, Discover Magazine, 2 Feb. 2021
• 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
• 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
• On camera, the young man explains away his guilty pleasure with a Janus-like, transactional ambivalence worthy of his hero.
  — Michael O'Sullivan, Washington Post, 11 July 2024
• 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

Last Updated: 26 Sep 2024