Word of the Day

: March 3, 2024

connive

verb kuh-NYVE

What It Means

To connive is to secretly help someone do something dishonest or illegal.

// Roger suspected that his coworkers were conniving to get him fired when in reality they were planning his surprise birthday party.

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connive in Context

"The truth is that conflict on the river will never be stilled because there will always be more demand for the water than there is water. As I reported in 'Colossus,' my 2010 book about the building of Hoover Dam, [Herbert] Hoover and his deputy, Arthur Powell Davis, connived in 1922 to exaggerate the Colorado River's flow in order to persuade all seven states that it carried enough water to serve their interests, then and into the future." — Michael Hiltzik, The Los Angeles Times, 8 Feb. 2023

Did You Know?

Connive may not seem like a term that would raise many hackles, but it certainly raised those of Wilson Follett, a usage critic who lamented that the word "was undone during the Second World War, when restless spirits felt the need of a new synonym for plotting, bribing, spying, conspiring, engineering a coup, preparing a secret attack." Follett thought connive should only mean "to wink at" or "to pretend ignorance." Those senses are closer to the Latin ancestor of the word: connive comes from the Latin verb connivēre, which means "to close the eyes" and which is descended from -nivēre, a form akin to the Latin verb nictare, meaning "to wink." But many English speakers disagreed, and the "conspire" sense is now the word's most widely used meaning.