1
as in negotiated
to plan out usually with subtle skill or care
let me look at my schedule and see if I can't finagle a visit to the museum
Synonyms & Similar Words
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Antonyms & Near Antonyms
2
as in cheated
to use dishonest methods to achieve a goal
she'll finagle until she gets exactly what she wants
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Recent Examples of finagled
On Sunday, August 10, the JoBros kicked off their Jonas20 tour in New Jersey, with Nick telling the audience that after Joe landed a lead role in the Disney Channel Original Movie, their dad finagled a way for Kevin and Nick to get parts as well.
—
Elizabeth Logan, Glamour, 11 Aug. 2025
This whole thing seems staged, planned, finagled, massaged, bamboozled, lollygagged, and all sorts of other long, silly-sounding words that may not necessarily apply to this situation.
—Brian Moylan, Vulture, 7 Aug. 2025
Elizabeth Logan, Glamour, 11 Aug. 2025
This whole thing seems staged, planned, finagled, massaged, bamboozled, lollygagged, and all sorts of other long, silly-sounding words that may not necessarily apply to this situation.
—Brian Moylan, Vulture, 7 Aug. 2025
Recent Examples of Synonyms for finagled
Verb
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Andy Bohn negotiated the deal for Greenwich, with CAA Media Finance repping the filmmakers.—
Matt Grobar,
Deadline,
25 Feb. 2026
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Centrist leaders in the United Kingdom, France and Germany resist spending a larger percentage of their strained budgets defending against a Russian threat that their far-right populist opponents might think can be easily negotiated away.—
Nick Paton Walsh,
CNN Money,
24 Feb. 2026
Verb
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Visitors to the sites at Independence Park were cheated when they were cut off from facts that enable us to imagine ourselves in the lives of those who lived and worked there.—
Carol Quillen,
Time,
21 Feb. 2026
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To sum up the series finale’s key moments, in the college timeline, Bree (Cat Missal), in a rage of anger after finding out that Lucy (Grace Van Patten) was the person Evan (Branden Cook) had cheated with, releases the tape of Lucy admitting to lying about being raped.—
Emily Longeretta,
Variety,
17 Feb. 2026
Verb
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Cribs, rollaways, and babysitting can be arranged.—
Condé Nast,
Condé Nast Traveler,
22 Feb. 2026
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But vanishingly few have the equipment and technical know-how for traditional letterpress printing, in which individual letters on wood or metal ‘type’ blocks are arranged into words, inked up and physically pressed onto paper.—
Jared Kaufman,
Twin Cities,
21 Feb. 2026
Verb
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Fix it Melissa Kingston, who serves as City Plan Commissioner for District 14, which includes parts of downtown and Uptown, said Saturday the report was deliberately manipulated to justify demolition rather than preservation.—
Nick Wooten,
Dallas Morning News,
21 Feb. 2026
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Months later, however, there is no public evidence that data has been manipulated, and Mark Hamrick, Bankrate senior economic analyst, said any tampering would likely be detected by private forecasters and civilian employees.—
Rachel Barber,
USA Today,
19 Feb. 2026
Verb
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This is the question explored in The War Room, which examines Bill Clinton's presidential bid via the proxies of James Carville and George Stephanopoulos, who ran his campaign and engineered its success in an outsized way.—
Eric Farwell,
Entertainment Weekly,
21 Feb. 2026
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The setup relies on a breakaway safety clasp, a small mechanism engineered to pop open under force to prevent strangulation, like the badge lanyards at any conference.—
Eric Sullivan,
Scientific American,
21 Feb. 2026
Cite this Entry
“Finagled.” Merriam-Webster.com Thesaurus, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/finagled. Accessed 28 Feb. 2026.
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