as in to exploit
to control or take advantage of by artful, unfair, or insidious means
played upon the customer's vanity to convince her to buy the expensive makeup kit
Synonyms & Similar Words
Relevance
Example Sentences
Recent Examples of Synonyms for play (upon)
Verb
-
Jeffrey Breinholt, an architect of the material support statutes who spent three decades as a federal terrorism prosecutor, defends the laws as crucial to closing loopholes that were exploited by foreign militant groups and their domestic sympathizers.—
Hannah Allam,
ProPublica,
10 Sep. 2025 -
Her 23-year-old son, Rahjah Ke’ Morton, recently accused her of exploiting his past cancer diagnosis for personal gain.—
Essence,
Essence,
10 Sep. 2025
Verb
-
In this approach, quantum information is encoded in various properties of photons, and computation is performed by manipulating these photonic states using optical components.—
Gil Press,
Forbes.com,
16 Sep. 2025
-
Tahoe is obviously getting more aggressive with icon-shape enforcement, up to and including automatically manipulating them and sentencing them to icon jail.—
ArsTechnica,
ArsTechnica,
15 Sep. 2025
Examples are automatically compiled from online sources to
show current usage.
Read More
Opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors.
Send us feedback.
Cite this Entry
“Play (upon).” Merriam-Webster.com Thesaurus, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/play%20%28upon%29. Accessed 17 Sep. 2025.
Copy CitationLove words? Need even more definitions?
Merriam-Webster unabridged
Share