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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.
Examples of connive in a Sentence
Chris Snellgrove, EW.com, 30 June 2025
The presence of Good, standing by her man, cast doubt on Jabbari, who is white, and helped create a counter-narrative: that a good Black man had been bamboozled by a conniving white woman.
—Doreen St. Félix, New Yorker, 5 Apr. 2025
Overall, my makeup still felt as sharp and conniving as Demi Engemann.
—Cam Zhang, StyleCaster, 1 July 2025
And there are some newbies, too: Bob, aka Sentry (Lewis Pullman) and Mel (Geraldine Viswanathan), who works for the conniving Valentina, whose actions set the plot in motion.
—Randy Myers, Mercury News, 28 Apr. 2025
See All Example Sentences for connive
Cite this Entry
“Connive.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/connive. Accessed 22 Jul. 2025.
Copy CitationKids Definition
connive
verb
Legal Definition
connive
transitive verb
Latin con(n)ivere to close one's eyes, knowingly overlook something
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