… revising the state's constitution through a series of legal stratagems and artifices …—W. Haywood Burns
b
: false or insincere behavior
social artifice
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The Difference Between Art and Artifice
Do great actors display artifice or art? Sometimes a bit of both. Artifice stresses creative skill or intelligence, but it also implies a sense of falseness and trickery. Art generally rises above such falseness, suggesting instead an unanalyzable creative force. Actors may rely on some of each, but the personae they display in their roles are usually artificial creations. Therein lies a lexical connection between art and artifice. Artifice comes from artificium, Latin for "artistry, craftmanship, craft, craftiness, and cunning." (That root also gave us the English word artificial.) Artificium, in turn, developed from ars, the Latin root underlying the word art (and related terms such as artist and artisan).
He spoke without artifice or pretense.
The whole story was just an artifice to win our sympathy.
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The film’s self-deprecatingly comedic artifice nonetheless captures chilling details of an adventure that starts with a demagogue’s cult-like following and ends with bloody corpses.—Richard Brody, New Yorker, 28 Mar. 2025 The sense of artifice is present throughout the film.—Bill Desowitz, IndieWire, 18 Mar. 2025 Soderbergh and Koepp, for their part, express their own fervent belief: in the seductive glamour of espionage and the magnetism of Blanchett’s and Fassbender’s interlocking gazes—which is to say, in the enveloping artifice and power of movies.—Justin Chang, The New Yorker, 12 Mar. 2025 But beneath all this color and artifice and levity runs something deeper and more personal.—Bilge Ebiri, Vulture, 7 Feb. 2025 See All Example Sentences for artifice
Word History
Etymology
borrowed from Anglo-French & Middle French, "trade, craft, craftsmanship, contrivance," borrowed from Latin artificium "artistry, craftsmanship, craft, craftiness, cunning," from artific-, artifex "practitioner of an art, specialist, craftsman, creator" (from art-, ars "acquired skill, craftsmanship" + -fic-, -fex, agentive derivative of facere "to make, bring about, do") + -ium, denominal or deverbal suffix of function or state — more at art entry 1, fact
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