Enlarge

Enlarge is a verb meaning to make something larger in size, extent, or importance. It can refer to increasing physical dimensions, magnifying an image, or expanding a concept or scope. In everyday use, to enlarge something is to augment its scale or reach, such as enlarging a photograph, a map, a document, or the text in a display.

The word derives from the prefix en- meaning to cause to be, combined with large, from Old French larg/large, related to width or extent. The sense of increasing size has persisted across languages, yielding common uses in many fields.

In imaging and printing, enlarging a picture means increasing its displayed or printed size, often through interpolation or resampling. In publishing, design, or user interfaces, enlarging typically refers to increasing type size, zoom level, or page dimensions to improve readability or accommodate layout constraints.

In mathematics and geometry, enlargement (or dilation) is a similarity transformation that expands figures about a center by a scale factor greater than one, preserving shape while increasing size. The inverse operation is reduction, with a scale factor between zero and one.

In English usage, enlarge on or enlarge upon something means to elaborate or develop it in more detail. The phrase is common in both formal writing and speech, and the related noun enlargement denotes the act or result of becoming larger.

Related terms include magnify, amplify, expand, and dilate, each carrying context-specific nuance of increasing size, extent, or intensity.