elaboration

noun

Etymology: From Middle French élaboration. Morphologically elaborate + -ion.

1. The act or process of producing or refining with labor; improvement by successive operations; refinement.

   “Digging deeper, the invention of eyeglasses is an elaboration of the more fundamental development of optics technology. The ability of a segment of a glass sphere to magnify whatever is placed before it was known around the year 1000, when the spherical segment was called a reading stone,[…].”

2. The natural process of formation or assimilation, performed by the living organs in animals and vegetables, by which a crude substance is changed into something of a higher order

   “the elaboration of food into chyme”

   “the elaboration of chyle, or sap, or tissues”

3. Setting up a hierarchy of calculated constants in a language such as Ada so that the values of one or more of them determine others further down in the hierarchy.
4. The process of taking a parsed tree of an abstract integrated circuit definition in a language such as Verilog and creating a hierarchy of module instances that ends with primitive (atomic) gates and statements.
5. The level of processing of a message or argument.