What this is
Explainly is a publication about understanding things. Not breaking news, not opinion, not commentary on commentary. Just careful explanations of the questions people genuinely type into a search box, written so that someone encountering the subject for the first time can follow them.
The subjects range widely on purpose. A reader who arrives wanting to know what an API is may leave knowing why bread goes stale, and we think that is a good afternoon.
How an explainer is built
Every piece on this site follows the same shape, because the shape is what makes it useful.
- The answer comes first. If you read only the opening two paragraphs, you should already have what you came for. Everything after that is for the reader who wants more.
- Then the mechanism. Not just what a thing is, but how it works and why it works that way, because that is the part that makes an explanation stick.
- Plain words over precise ones, where the two conflict. "Kubernetes is basically a system that helps you run lots of containers across many machines" beats a definition that is technically flawless and completely opaque.
- An honest edge. Where something is genuinely unsettled, the piece says so rather than papering over it with confident prose.
How these were written
The explainers published at launch were drafted with substantial help from a large language model and edited for structure and clarity. They have not yet been checked line by line against primary sources.
We would rather tell you that than let you assume otherwise. Read them as a well-informed starting point, and check the primary source before relying on anything that matters. The editorial policy sets out the standard we are working towards and where this archive currently falls short of it.
What this site will not do
There is a great deal of writing on the internet that exists to occupy a search result rather than to answer a question. It is padded to hit a word count, structured to delay the answer, and stuffed with phrases nobody says out loud.
If a paragraph is not helping the reader understand something, it should not be on the page.
So: no five-hundred-word preamble before the definition. No invented expertise. No pretending to a standard of verification we have not yet met. If we get something wrong, we correct it and say that we did.
The topics
Nine of them, each with its own page: definitions under What Is, words and slang under Meaning, then Technology, Science, Business, Culture, History, Everyday Life and Psychology.
Getting in touch
Corrections are the most welcome kind of message, and topic suggestions are a close second. Both go to the same place: the contact page.