connive
Verb
Verb Forms: connived, conniving, connives
- To secretly allow something morally wrong to occur; to conspire.
- encourage or assent to illegally or criminally
- form intrigues (for) in an underhand manner
- To secretly cooperate with other people in order to commit a crime or other wrongdoing; to collude, to conspire.
- Of parts of a plant: to be converging or in close contact; to be connivent.
- Often followed by at: to pretend to be ignorant of something in order to escape blame; to ignore or overlook a fault deliberately.
- To open and close the eyes rapidly; to wink.
Examples
- He tried to CONNIVE a way to play all his tiles for a bingo, but the letters just wouldn’t cooperate.
Origin / Etymology
From French conniver (“to ignore and thus become complicit in wrongdoing”), or directly from its etymon Latin con(n)īvēre (“close or screw up the eyes, blink, wink; overlook, turn a blind eye, connive”) (perhaps alluding to two persons involved in a scheme together winking to each other), from con- (prefix indicating a being or bringing together of several objects) + *nīvēre (related to nictō (“to blink, wink”), from Proto-Indo-European *kneygʷʰ- (“to bend, droop”)).
Synonyms
intrigue, scheme, dissimulate, look the other way, shut one's eyes, turn a blind eye, wink
Scrabble Score: 12
connive: valid Scrabble (US) TWL Wordconnive: valid Scrabble Word in Merriam-Webster MW Dictionary
connive: valid Scrabble Word in International Collins CSW Dictionary