Parse
Etymology
From the Latin phrase “pars orationis,” a part of speech, used in the old schoolroom drill of naming each word’s grammatical role. “Pars” simply means part. The word widened from grammar to any careful decomposition — a sentence, a contract, a face — and then to computing, where a parser reads structured text.
verb · /PARSS/
To break something down into its parts to work out exactly how it fits together.
What it names
Close structural analysis — the reading that resolves a dense or ambiguous whole into its components and their relations.
Example
It took three lawyers to parse what the clause actually obligated the company to do.
Related idea
To parse is to resolve something into its parts; to conflate is to wrongly fuse parts that should stay separate. Parsing pulls apart what conflating jams together.