connive
Pronunciation Verb
Related terms Translations
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Pronunciation Verb
connive (connives, present participle conniving; past and past participle connived)
- (intransitive) Often followed by with: to secretly cooperate with another person or persons in order to commit a crime or other wrongdoing; to collude, to conspire. [from mid 17th c.]
- 1844, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “A Drama of Exile”, in Poems. [...] In Two Volumes, volume I, London: Edward Moxon, […], OCLC 270767504 ↗, page 7 ↗:
- I might say, / That who despairs, acts; that who acts, connives / With God's relations set in time and space; [...]
- (intransitive, botany, rare) Of part#Noun|parts of a plant#Noun|plant: to be converging or in close#Adjective|close contact#Noun|contact; to be connivent.
- (intransitive, obsolete) Often followed by at: to pretend#Verb|pretend to be ignorant of something in order to escape#Verb|escape blame#Noun|blame; to ignore or overlook a fault#Noun|fault deliberately.
- Synonyms: dissimulate, look the other way, shut one's eyes, turn a blind eye, wink
- 1849, Thomas Babington Macaulay, chapter I, in The History of England from the Accession of James II, volume I, London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, OCLC 1069526323 ↗, page 36 ↗:
- A nation of hardy archers and spearmen might, with small risk to its liberties, connive at some illegal acts on the part of a prince whose general administration was good, and whose throne was not defended by a single company of regular soldiers.
- (intransitive, obsolete) To open#Verb|open and close#Verb|close the eye#Noun|eyes rapidly; to wink#Verb|wink.
- The artist is to teach them how to nod judiciously, and to connive with either eye, and, in a word, the whole practice of political grimace.
Conjugation of connive
| infinitive | (to) connive | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| present tense | past tense | ||
| 1st-person singular | connive | connived | |
| 2nd-person singular | connivest* | connived, connivedst* | |
| 3rd-person singular | connives, conniveth* | connived#English|connived | |
| plural | connive | ||
| subjunctive | connive | ||
| imperative | connive | — | |
| participle> participles | conniving | connived | |
| * Archaic or obsolete. | |||
- French: conspirer, intriguer
- German: aushecken, verschwören
- Russian: сгова́риваться
- Spanish: confabular, conspirar
- French: feindre l'ignorance
- German: sich dumm stellen
- Spanish: hacerse el leso (Chile, colloquial)
This text is extracted from the Wiktionary and it is available under the CC BY-SA 3.0 license | Terms and conditions | Privacy policy 0.003