interrogate

4 definitions • 5 examples

to ask someone a lot of questions for a long time in order to get information, sometimes using threats or violence:

Thousands of dissidents have been interrogated or imprisoned in recent weeks.

to get information from a computer:

The computer language was originally developed to make it faster to interrogate a database.

to ask questions about something as a way of analysing it or finding out more about it:

The book interrogates the way numbers are handled and mishandled by politicians and the media.

This all sounds perfectly sensible until we start to interrogate the underlying assumptions.

to ask someone many questions in a formal situation, often in a forceful way that can be seen as threatening:

We were stopped at the border and interrogated for hours by the police.