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Involve

1. To roll or fold up; to wind round; to entwine. Some of serpent kind . . . Involved Their snaky folds. (Milton)

2. To envelop completely; to surround; to cover; to hide; to involve in darkness or obscurity. And leave a singed bottom all involved With stench and smoke. (Milton)

3. To complicate or make intricate, as in grammatical structure. Involved discourses.

4. To connect with something as a natural or logical consequence or effect; to include necessarily; to imply. He knows his end with mine involved. (Milton) The contrary necessarily involves a contradiction. (Tillotson)

5. To take in; to gather in; to mingle confusedly; to blend or merge. The gathering number, as it moves along, involves a vast involuntary throng. (Pope) Earth with hell to mingle and involve. (Milton)

6. To envelop, infold, entangle, or embarrass; as, to involve a person in debt or misery.

7. To engage thoroughly; to occupy, employ, or absorb. Involved in a deep study.

8. (Science: mathematics) to raise to any assigned power; to multiply, as a quantity, into itself a given number of times; as, a quantity involved to the third or fourth power.

Imply is opposed to express, or set forth; thus, an implied engagement is one fairly to be understood from the words used or the circumstances of the case, though not set forth in form 702 . Involve goes beyond the mere interpretation of things into their necessary relations; and hence, if one thing involves another, it so contains it that the two must go together by an indissoluble connection. War, for example, involves wide spread misery and death; the premises of a syllogism involve the conclusion.

Synonym: to imply, include, implicate, complicate, entangle, embarrass, overwhelm.

Origin: L. Involvere, involutum, to roll about, wrap up; pref. In- in _ volvere to roll: cf. OF. Involver. See voluble, and cf. Involute.